EVERYBODY IN THE REFLECTION POOL!
By David Cotner
Portentous but never pretentious, the remote and insular visions of loneliness that manifest throughout Edward Walton Wilcox's work are on full display in this overview of recent paintings. "When the anxieties of this world become too severe," he admits, "I create for myself ... a reflection pool for the mind. It is there that I withdraw to the twilight fields and amber vistas of my dreams." All right, maybe just a tad pretentious, but Wilcox has talent and imagination for miles, so he's excused — besides, one rarely thinks of such timeless art coming from either the University of Florida or Juxtapoz. The eye swallows up his isolated apocalypses in miniature that glow with burnished fury as houses go up in flames and twilit sleepwalkers find themselves in the middle of nowhere. In Wilcox's spaces, no one can hear you scream — they just watch you do it in radiantly muted, sepia-toned slow-motion. His images bring to mind that old Night Gallery episode in which Roddy McDowall has a painting of a cemetery that changed every time he looked at it, until one night — in the ultimate culmination of implications associated with suddenly empty graves — he hears a knock at his door. Wilcox's work is a brilliant and romantic star hurtling through the same galaxy as fellow travelers Odd Nerdrum and Hieronymous Bosch, so if you like your aesthetic dread spiked with the imploding placid inevitable, then this is the art for you.
Edward Walton Wilcox
Recent Work
EVERY TUESDAY THROUGH SATURDAY 12 - 6 PM UNTIL SAT., MAY 23
Los Angeles
Merry Karnowsky Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition by artist Edward Walton Wilcox. Wilcox’s sepiatoned gothic paintings and Medieval style altarpieces merge classical technique with modern perception.
Wilcox’s haunting paintings of young blond girls and landscapes of beauty and impeding disaster are seeped in symbolic context. Warm umbers accentuated with subtle flesh tones are achieved through a series of burnishing and glazing techniques, giving the work a shadowy depth seldom seen since the Illuminists of the 1800’s.
While Wilcox’s paintings reference the highly romanticized past of previous centuries, his constructions evoke religious iconography dating back to the beginning of mankind’s search for salvation. A carved wooden altarpiece of Noah’s Ark includes sea dragons and black birds circling its gothic spires. The back room of the exhibition is transformed into a snowy winter’s day, with a full-size wagon carrying a simple wooden coffin.
The artist explains, “My work is a moral critique of a world attempting to shroud itself in beauty and diversion in the midst of its own collapse. My intention is for the work to have a preternatural effect on the viewer; evoking at times a sense of awe, terror, insignificance, romantic sensuality, allusions to our self-destructive nature, the temporal nature of beauty and life, and the decay of the material world as a constant of which we are always aware.”
Originally from West Palm Beach, Florida, Wilcox earned a BFA in Painting with high honors from the University of Florida, where he also received the Presidential Award for Excellence in the Arts. Wilcox’s work has shown in California, New York, Florida, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and has appeared in publications such as The LA Times, Juxtapoz, Coagula Art Journal and FLAUNT Magazine.
For More Information, please contact:
Merry Karnowsky at mkgallery@att.net.
Press Contact:
Ellen Thompson ellen@mkgallery.com
Merry Karnowsky Gallery
170 S. La Brea Avenue (in the Art 170 Building) • Los Angeles, CA 90036 • (323) 933-4408
5th Annual INCOGNITO Benefit
May 2, 2009
Doors open at 7 p.m. sharp.
Cocktails and hors d’oeuvres served from 7 to 9:30 p.m., with music by DJ Eddie Ruscha.
INCOGNITO, the highly anticipated exhibition and art sale to benefit the Santa Monica Museum of Art, will feature an unprecedented number of acclaimed artists—more than 480—who have donated their works in an 8” x 10" format. All the works in INCOGNITO are $300 each (plus tax) and are signed on the back, with artist identities revealed only after purchase.
For ticket information:
LINK: http://69.65.10.199/~smmoart/pickle/index.php/programs/group/0/2
To read full article download PDF from Coagula.net
Magazine of the Arts
REVIEW
Crimes of Romance - Solo Exhibition
Edward Walton Wilcox situates his art within the estranged duality of beauty and repulsion. The title of his latest show, Crimes of Romance, gives evidence of this thin veil he has found between life and death, leading to a strange aesthetic of contrasts.
The nature of Wilcox's work lies in a dark Romanticism clearly inspired by techniques and styles associated with the European Gothic and Netherlandish Renaissance. His paintings and sculptures both evolve out of traditional structure and classical form but are skewed by his contemporary sensibility. This stylistic deconstruction echoes in Wilcox's subjects, with their festering flesh and decomposition, and is heightened by his mostly monochromatic palette.
Surrounded by sweeping wastelands and other austere landscapes, Wilcox's figures stand in the dichotomy between innocence and corruption, light and dark, beauty and decay, a balance of juxtapositions. Overtly alluding to biblical iconography, paintings such as Salome and Martyr cunningly infuse youth and sensuality with the macabre. The recurring theme of dialectic opposition establishes a yin/yang harmony while yielding dissonant, even disturbing scenarios. Creating intensely violent and frightening scenes, Wilcox romanticizes the nature of death, allowing biblical allusions of sin and judgment to bleed through his pictures. The effect is cathartic, allowing the viewer to see the world in its true temporal state, when fear becomes the status quo and death just another dream. Within this production of existence and annihilation we find balance: all that is beautiful must die, and all that is dead shall be reborn.
by Vanessa Villegas
Limited Edition Artist Manipulated Reproductions Available online
