Kind Words

A culmination of a recent body of work, the show explores ideas of how the language of painting, formal elements of colour, structure and gesture can make up abstract compositions where painterly properties are the focus.

Drawing from the language of minimalism, the paintings are often compositionally made up of singular gestures. He rarely uses paintbrushes, instead adopting unconventional tools to create these marks. The gestures created from these processes often act as compositional focal points, and paintings are sometimes left as finished work once these marks are made. The idea of making big gestures in smaller paintings and vice versa is a theme, and as a result, the works tend to vary widely in scale. Compositional frameworks, often geometric, serve to act as place settings for the more gestural elements of the paintings and act to build tension between these very disparate methods of working. The show’s title refers to these varying elements of language in Will’s practice, where the works act as words in a larger sentence, with each painting contextualising the next to make up a broader inquiry.

@will.h.wilford