Tim Wilson’s small paintings, now at Nathalie Karg Gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, offer a peculiar amalgam of quietude and foreboding, realized with a muted palette that reverberates on many other levels. In keeping with the exhibition’s title, “Between Either and Or”(which I believe misleadingly suggests a metaphorical stasis within Kierkegaard’s open dichotomy), the eighteen panels are reflections on immobility, though they easily break free from the restrictions imposed by their unusual source material: cropped sections of background staging taken from stills of fifty-year-old films. Meditations on what any of us might choose to lock our gaze upon in the midst of a passive stare, the paintings nevertheless allow for a dream-like malleability that mitigates the stiff tenor of their initial appearance.
Wilson’s paintings, all made this or last year, are clearly representational. One easily recognizes the bottom of a staircase, an oblique view of a framed mirror, or receding horizontals defining a line of restaurant tables, all scenes empty of figures but charged with their absence. Measuring an average of sixteen by twenty inches, the panels lure the observer close to the surface, to a viewing distance one would typically keep before a Vermeer. The comparison is fitting, both in the way Wilson’s stolen glances mimic Vermeer’s voyeurism and in the way Wilson’s soft-focus technique translates the gleaming surfaces of picture frames, chandeliers, and other domestic accouterments into pure light. The silver tea set establishing the foreground of Sitting Room liquefies into mercurial clouds that float in a trompe l’oeil shimmer similar to the Delft master’s legendary halation.
Read the full article here.
