Tim Wilson

LSS Paris

“Drift Halation”

2025 February 1 to March 1

“What has been, has been”—Gustave Courbet

Tim Wilson’s paintings of lamps, mirrors, lonely stairwells, and unoccupied rooms recall the romantic anonymity of staying in an expensive hotel; in front of them I feel an illicit thrill, as if I’d given a fake name to the concierge. Lying suits them—in the tradition of reflexivity they come out of, their true subject is less the centered objects and quiet spaces they depict than it is artifice, glimpsed in the bright underpainting bleeding through the image, the materiality of the canvases’ deckled edges and rough, cold-press surfaces. The painter’s ruthless attunement to compositional order prioritizes a syntax of form and color that is more abstract than representational, disinterested in depth of space, disinterested in the asymmetrical messiness of real life. These are not malicious lies. They are lies told by a friend, possessed with a melancholic knowledge, and I look at them — I listen to their quietness — hoping to glean what they are trying to impart.

I’ve been in the presence of Wilson’s paintings many times, starting in a studio on Grand Street in Brooklyn a handful of years ago. He was experimenting with painting on burlap then, letting the coarsely woven material subvert the delicate exactness of his paintings, a related but more exaggerated effect than what the paper and linen grain gives his present work. I’ve seen his canvases perched in a line on the edge of his couch and flat on the work table he set up in his living room. I’ve seen them exhibited, and marveled at their relation to each other. Wilson’s control of sequence and spacing is as deliberate outside the canvas as within. In all of these contexts, I’ve felt their insistence on fact—the fact of material, the fact of painting. They don’t need me to believe their lies; in them, artifice is simply another fact. As diminutive in size and straightforward in subject as they are, I see in them a philosophical stance. They revel in beauty and mystery but do not imbue the unknown with any higher meaning. Mystery, the past, desire, death––these too are just facts.

Wilson, who survived an accident that has partly impaired his hearing, stands to the right of me when we walk together, and it’s familiar to see him cup his hand at his ear in order to hear me—my bad habit of mumbling doesn’t help. I think of that gesture sometimes when I feel that I must stand very close and very still and tilt my ear to his canvases in order to hear them. They are not entirely silent. I can make out the padding of feet on a carpet, the clinking of glasses in the hotel restaurant, the faint buzzing of the stairwell light.

Because his accident involved a flight of stairs, and because I’ve heard him tell a story about a dramatic incident having to do with his grandmother’s lamp, it is tempting to read into his choice of subject matter a hidden narrative. I think that is an over-interpretive impulse, a desire for story and meaning. Instead, his work erases narrative altogether. Life exists before or after an event, simply a kind of waiting—to be seated, for the arrival of a friend or partner, for the light to change.

Maybe because his source images are taken sometimes from films, I have often thought of Godard’s Contempt when looking at Wilson’s paintings, in particular the prologue scene in which Brigitte Bardot lies in bed, light filters abruptly changing the mood in which she appears. That color and thus feeling can change so suddenly and — from a certain view — arbitrarily, resonates with the concept of contempt, that invisible crossing between two people. In Wilson’s paintings, color is often invented but always forcefully, irrevocably real. ‘Arbitrary,’ artificial, and yet no less a fact.

Color is infinite, which is to say unmasterable, but of our living painters, Wilson makes a strong argument for being one of its most masterful practitioners. It is color most of all, to my eye, that his paintings wait for—that sudden changing color from which there is no going back.

—Henry Chapman

Wilson’s paintings inhabit desolate interiors, presenting themselves as evocative yet meditative studies of light, color, materiality, and perception. These compositions unfold as suspended moments, not fully rooted in time or place, yet firmly anchored in their painterly reality. With a brush both loose and deliberate, Wilson suggests rather than defines forms, allowing light to pool and fragment across surfaces, shaping the air of the room. This interplay of precision and abstraction invites viewers to linger in the understated spaces between clarity and ambiguity.

Wilson’s imagery emerges from a diverse array of sources—film, television, the internet, and his own photography—distilling the pervasive visual vocabulary of contemporary media into moments of subtle revelation. By attending to the overlooked peripheries of cinematic mise-en-scène, he redirects attention from the apparent to the contingent edges of perception, transformed through context. In this reframing, lamps emit faint radiance, floral arrangements waver like apparitions, and mirrors splinter rooms into fragmented reflections, blending opacity and transparency. These recurring motifs act not as focal points but as conduits for presence and potential, dissolving into moments of chromatic complexity and soft halation.

Working quickly, wet into wet, Wilson captures the immediacy of fleeting impressions, while subtle underpainting of ochres, pinks, and greens emerges through the surface, evoking the patina of memory. His interiors exude a subdued refinement—ornate furnishings, polished surfaces, and intricate moldings suggest sophistication and restrained opulence. Yet these spaces are not purely pristine or romanticized; their muted palettes and understated imperfections root them in a kind of realism—a theater of constructed reality imbued with ambivalence.

Mounted on stretched linen, the irregular surface and edges of the painted paper emphasize the dual nature of Wilson’s work as both image and object. These delicate boundaries serve as subtle reminders of the medium’s fragility, suggesting a realm suspended between presence and absence, where perception and memory intertwine in luminous tension and harmony. Wilson’s interiors invite viewers to linger in their quiet grandeur, offering not conclusions but openings for reflection.

BIOGRAPHY:

Tim Wilson (b. 1970, Newport News, Virgnia ) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He holds an MFA from Yale University School of Art and a BFA from The Virginia Commonwealth University.

Tim Wilson’s work inspires viewers to reflect on the space they take up in the world, as well as the intimacies of the spaces they inhabit. His purposeful use of colour and texture functions as a visual analog to this intention—a discursive mutation of process, driven by the tension between intuition and intentionality. Such stillness gives way to highly mediate pieces of art. There is almost a contradiction between the materiality of painting and the sensory awareness Wilson brings to his work.

He says; “I see painting as a model for those physical conditions governed by natural laws that seemingly give rise to a sense of self and notions of free will. I'm attempting to mimic that unfolding and at the same time, create thought through painting material. In doing so, my work attempts to be what it represents and represents it simultaneously—a sort of onomatopoeia in painting language that seeks to find meaning in nothing… An artist’s single brush stroke contains a multitude of decisions within a microsecond.”

Tim Wilson has been awarded residencies at Offshore Residency, Sol LeWitt Studio, Shandaken Project and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Most recently, his work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Fahrenheit Madrid (Madrid, Spain), Alfred University (Alfred, NY) and Sardine (Brooklyn, NY) among others. He has been included in several group shows, including, JDJ (New York, NY), The Flag Art Foundation (New York, NY), Jack Hanley Gallery (New York, NY), Park Avenue Armory (New York, NY) and Downtown+ (Paris, France). He has co-curated several groups shows, including, Kadel Willborn (New York, NY) .