There’s no such thing as an alright abstract painting. They fall, without exception, into two categories: great and garbage. And for whoever’s looked at an abstract artwork, smugly harrumphed and muttered, “I could do that,” I’d point to any of the works hanging in Patrick Wilson’s “Keeping Time,” and ask, “Could you really?”

Abstraction is difficult enough to get right, but hard-edged, color-field abstraction? Doubly so. There’s a reason why the critic Clement Greenberg, by the late 1950s, had more or less eschewed the works of the “action” painters like Jackson Pollock in favor of color-field abstraction (what Greenberg called “post-painterly abstraction.”) Color-field abstractions, like the works of Patrick Wilson, boom or bust on the artist’s ability to convey through color and balance alone.

In this regard, “Keeping Time” is a stroke of mastery. Wilson’s frame within frame style always manages to keep you on your toes as the works, never culminating, constantly build and subtract within themselves. We can see this effect in a work titled Afternoon Breeze (2020). A patch of blue, in one place vibrant, melts into the red background with a mild transparency, and is harshly bisected by a think pink frame. Nearby, a pink and orange frame overlaps a field of subtly gradating maroon and sienna, capturing on one end a shred of the hot pink background. Finally, the offset canvases abutting at a hard right angle throw the entire work into a rectilinear staccato.

But the peak of the exhibition lies at the end of the gallery, with a work titled Night Bloom (2020). Here, Wilson does it all. While the blocks of color – pink, lilac, sky blue, maroon, merlot, etc. – form a brilliant and vivid cascade, the triumph is in the detailing. All throughout the painting, Wilson uses millimeter thick lines to create boundary after boundary, stacking them one atop another, obscuring some with the fields of color and cutting straight across others with reckless abandon. But still, it all stays within the canvas. That final boundary remains unchallenged, and everything you need to see is within it.

“Keeping Time”, on view at Vielmetter Los Angeles until April 24th, is a high-wire act – and Patrick Wilson doesn’t stumble.

Vielmetter Los Angeles
1700 S Santa Fe Ave #101, LA, CA, 90021
Thru Apr. 24, 2021; Appointment Only