As far as strategies to prompt viewers to linger and look closer at visual art, shock and humor will only get you so far. Compelling narratives might work, but this is not really available to abstractionists beyond idiosyncratic materiality. But if there’s one way to go that never fails; it is to give us a mystery to solve—or better yet, scores of them—and this is where Patrick Wilson excels. In a new series of hard-edge abstract paintings, Wilson painstakingly composes symphonic architectures of line and color that capture not only the eye, but the imagination.

        Wilson is best known for his dexterity with organizing untold layers of pigment with various degrees of translucence and a prismatic jewel and earth toned palette into apparently rectilinear schematics. He generates gentle paradoxes of hard and soft, geometric and organic, flat and expansive, fixed and dynamic, saturated and ethereal. The obsessive perfection of each straight line, no matter how thin, does manage to impose something like order on the chromatic passages, even seeming a bit at odds with their profusion of radiance. And those colors—aquamarine, vermillion, sienna, mint, teal, peach, burgundy, emerald, white—do radiate. What at first sight presents like pure color blocking quickly reveals itself as a whole universe of infinite, gestural life. But the lit-up gradients, tiny drifts of shadow, glimpses of layered depths behind the surface, light refracted and absorbed and released again—all of this contributes to an inescapable urge to solve the mystery—mysteries, really—of whether you are really seeing what you’re seeing, and how in the world he did it.

        In contrapuntal works like Orange Crush a study in color wheel contrasts of blues and oranges gives is the closest things to a coastal sunset vista Wilson will ever offer. In Free Lemons, the poetics of suffused yellow warmth are theatrically offset by the smallest amount of cool purple possible. A cheeky slice of sky blue does the same for the blood orange colorway of the pensive, antiquarian energy of Tomato Garden. At scales from the relatively intimate to the architecturally engaged, each individual composition of stacked and tucked-in squares and rectangles into a self-contained ecosystem as unique as a planet in the sky—making it clear that Wilson’s real subject is the nature of perception itself, as well as how and how much the fine-tuned mechanics of color theory can leverage that to impart story and spark emotion in its own language.

vielmetter.com

Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, curator, and author based in Los Angeles. Formerly LA Weekly arts editor, her writing appears in LA Times, Alta Journal, Flaunt, and other publications. She is the recipient of the Rabkin Art Writers Prize and the LA Press Club Critic of the Year award.