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Marx & Zavattero

April 3 - May 11, 2010

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77 Geary Street 2nd Floor San Francisco, CA 94108
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Considering Truth and Beauty Big Purple, 67" x 72" acrylic on canvas, 2009
Opening reception for the artist: Thursday, April 3, 5:30 – 7:30 PM Marx & Zavattero is excited to announce Los Angeles artist Patrick Wilson’s first solo exhibition at the gallery April 3 – May 10. On view will be a series of his luscious acrylic on canvas paintings that illuminate the visual experience through Wilson’s sophisticated layering of color and light. Wilson’s new body of work incorporates up to five different surfaces into one painting, resulting in a myriad of translucent layers, tonal shifts, and blurring color fields. The effect is dazzling, recalling the work of light and space artists Robert Irwin & James Turrell. Wilson has always explored the visual experience and how he can translate what he sees around him — the varied shades of the Los Angeles sky, shifting landscapes from a speeding car, his combination of intuition and logic — into paint. Some of the layers are so dense that they suggest a three-dimensionality as in The Poetry of Construction, in which the top half of the painting is painted a gray-white and seems to float above the surface, evoking a Craig Kauffman bubble piece. The titles of his paintings, such as Pleasure and Totem, demonstrate the artist’s belief in creating works out of desire and passion. Through this meticulous attention to detail, Wilson has accomplished a unique objective by making paintings that take time to unfold in front of the viewer layer after layer, color after color. “They look like quilts sewn with pieces of light and space, like plans for impossible architecture, or like floating chunks of concrete,” Wilson remarks. “They’re easy-going and serious at the same time. The colors in some of the paintings are agitated, others are calm. They all appear to have an unnatural light source.” In this exhibition, Wilson makes a strong case for slowing down and really taking the time to look at what is in front of you. The result is a series of alarmingly beautiful paintings that are uniquely his own, but owe a huge debt to the city that inspires him. Wilson has exhibited widely with solo shows at Suzanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; FuseBox, Washington, DC; Stefan Stux, NY; Brian Gross, San Francisco; and Rebecaa Ibel, Columbus, OH. His work has been featured in recent group shows such as icandy: Current Abstraction in Southern California, Cypress College Art Gallery, Cypress, CA; Keeping it Straight: Right Angles and Hard Edges In Contemporary Southern California Art, Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA (curated by Peter Frank); Selections from the Permanent Collection, Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA; and Gyroscope, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, among many others. His work is in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Creative Artists Agency, Los Angeles, CA; Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Progressive Corporation, Mayfield Village, OH; and 20th Century Fox, Los Angeles, CA, among many other public and private collections. Wilson received his BA at the University of California Davis, and MFA at the Claremont Graduate University.