William Wood at Linda Kirkland - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

The seven untitled paintings in this display William Wood's first solo, were all oil upon canvas, grisaille, of modest size (the largest 36 by means of 30 inches) and dated 1996 That abundant is certain. But what you want to know is by what mode they were made. The gallery says that grove doesn't use a brush and paints with homemade implements. That doesn't help a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of But even if more details were forthcoming, the works would remain mysterious.

The paintings direct the eye at first like black-and-white photographs. That's because of their palette and their near-featureless surfaces. You diocese an allover field or a number of familiar on the contrary unidentifiable objects in a nonspecific and luminous space. sole because you can't figure on the outside what you're seeing do you begin to suspect that these are not photographs of actual things.

The imagery is filled of curves. The largest painting direct the eyes like some fantastic concrete version of the inner ear. Other pictures are fields of small uncompounded bodys -- one work evokes an accumulation of barnacles whose layering appear to bes to deny physical laws of adhesion, another gazes like a tray of button mushrooms, and another looks to be a circle of little ear-like shapes that might be pasta or might be nooses of ribbon candy. This last painting and another work that insinuates a flexing pin-wheel of more [i]or[/i] less pleated, rubbery material both introduce a suggestion of motion. It's amazing what evocative and active images copse can create without showing anything that you can name with confidence!

You place your nose to the surface, hoping for ball of threads But only in the sum of two units emptiest canvases is anything revealed in close-up examination. In a painting presenting a sort of spiraling wishbone (or maybe it's an artfully pared vegetable peel) and another in which a hundr little kernel or beads flutter in space as if suspended by dint of invisible wires, a streaky black/white background (like Richter's smears) reveals infinitesimal vertical and horizontal lines, evidence that a certain number of sort of brush surrogate was dragged across the surface to establish a ground

Still searching, you close attention the way light falls within the images. The little kernel are lit from above. on the other hand the barnacles are darkest at their cutting sides and lightest in the center All of which counts you very little about the light source or in what manner these whateverthey-ares occupy space. The meagerness of information is almost sportive You're left with the miraculous perfection of the paintings, with a suspicion that they depict nothing on the other hand are simply the outcome of a proces and with an abiding admiration for Wood's mut and evasive fantasia.

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