Through the subway doors, there is a commotion— a cart crashing, a light falling? Something breaking. Through the window, or a gap that mimics one, there is a viking ship. In the middle of wide swaths of bright and surprising color, there is text: a logo, neat lettering, crisp flowers across a cardboard coffee cup sleeve. Your eyes fight over where to look. Do you stick to the object you can understand or float into the color void that surrounds it?
Chase Wilson’s series of paintings at Foyer LA lives in that in between space, the place where figures and abstract space touch. His paintings are not perfect squares; hung horizontally and vertically, they all ap- pear slightly off, a shape that pushes you through it instead of defining you as the outside observer. Hung right about at waist level, to look at it means to exist inside.
I felt disoriented looking at some of the paintings: many suggest a level of detail that isn’t really there, like relying on a memory to tell someone a story only to realize you know what that day felt like, but not what you actually did. I wanted to be able to define what I was looking at, which he almost allows you to do— and then, grand brush strokes of color surround, swirling you into some other motion, some other experience of looking.
In Wilson’s 2018 solo exhibition at Art Movement LA, “Speeches and Still Lives”, he layered photoreal- istic fish into portraits of his sister reading a piece of fiction at a public reading, her eyes cast down on the paper in her hands, the fish floating in the ether. The space around her wasn’t empty, instead, filled, the negative space given its own quality of weight and stickiness—as physicists believed, when the standing theory of negative space was that it didn’t exist, that what we had where there was no us and no object was ether. In this iteration of Wilson’s work, there is no negative space either; but instead of ether, here, there is color.
What I first thought was a crash as viewed through subway doors is actually an abstracted image of the January sixth siege of the capitol, the blurs of color rummaging for space and domination. The viking ship shows up in two paintings, slightly different sizes in each, a looming symbol of colonial masculinity, an incoming ship from another time. The painting stops the process, freezing the ship, stopping, in a sense, the violence attached to its idea. Perhaps all it can do is want to.
Wilson usually begins painting from a process idea, rather than an idea of the figures and landscapes he wants to paint. He painted this series of work wet on wet oil paint. Oil paint takes a while to dry; while the oil is still liquid, Wilson pushed and pulled paint around, a physically difficult process, racing against the drying layer to complete the painting. When the oil paint dries, the entire layer of the painting is sealed and cannot be touched.
The process pressurizes the work, and Wilson’s body, which is white and male, while the work itself pres- surizes ideas of whiteness as well as everyday objects. I think about what can be contained and not. Ether was a compelling explanation of our world, because it held something (for example, ether makes ghosts easily explainable). Maybe here, Wilson’s work pressurizes what can’t quite be held in one place, and tries to stare, then wanders, then stares again.
Julia Hannafin, May 2021
