Still life meets prop table in a series of surreal symbolist tableaux, as painter Michael Hilsman inventories his dreams and sets the scene for unguessable actions to come, or inscrutable actions just past. In capacious landscape-based works, Hilsman offers horizon lines, divisions of land, water and sky, and the full-length figure. In much smaller compositions, his particular and peculiar family of arrayed objects snuggle and jostle each other rather than enjoying a stately, spread-out repose, and the figure (the “man” in the eponymous Man with… paintings) is reduced to the head—well, actually to the ear. Across and through and around, in front and behind, above and below this “man,” are set and strewn a lexicon of images that repeat like a coded language: thorns and the blood they draw; hands and gloves as avatars of presence; flowers and cacti as proof of life; water as the wavering subconscious mind; cutlery as tool and threat; oranges and other fruit for color and the warm season; cigars, playing cards, cups, a hammer, a gun, a skull and more.

Michael Hilsman, Still Life With Hammer and Things, 2023. Courtesy of Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.

With such crisp articulation of specific imagery, it can be tempting to focus on deciphering the meaning of each object and their discourse in the composition. But that misses two main sources of joy and adventure in the works. Joy, because the palette is so stridently eccentric, veering between alluring naturalism and queasy invention; the paint is applied with careful, heavy attention, splicing slivers of pictorial space from within its tipped-up flatness. Adventure, because it’s crucial to bear in mind that the artist himself is not entirely sure of the work’s ultimate meaning, or meanings. He has remembered dreams, had visions and intuitions, observed the world and drafted its imagery into the service of his contemplations, tickled an occasional funny bone, and basically laid it all out so that he could decode it for himself as well. 

The titles are written inside the pictorial space, delicately lettered onto a color field, sometimes quite prominently, as though the paintings were field notes or journal entries. They are deceptively specific, like the imagery itself, seeming to lay things out but jealously guarding their ambiguity. Man with Cutlery and Citrus; Man with Roses; Man with Book in Landscape; Hand, Flowers, Water; Still Life with Hammer and Things; Man Touching Thorn—these and other works (all 2023, oil on linen, ranging from an almost monumental 78 x 114 in., to a darling 11 x 14 in.) make use of deep blue, contrapuntal orange, flooded flesh, filmy green, mustardy yellow and bloody reds to both emphasize and deflect the pull of literalism. We witness the artist’s exegesis at a distance, but we are invited to make our own sense of it as well, as if his dreams were ours.