VICTORI + MO is delighted to announce, Mirage Mirage, an exhibition of new paintings by Brian Willmont. The exhibition, marking his third show and second solo presentation with the gallery, is on view through October 26th.
Employing trompe l'oeil techniques, Willmont seamlessly blends abstract and decorative elements with iconic symbolism. Referencing the pop aesthetics associated with commercial airbrush technique, Willmont creates original paintings through a continual process of addition and subtraction, simultaneously informed by repetition, the handmade and the digital. There is a transformation that happens as Willmont alternates between digital renderings and analog processes within a single work.
Primarily concerned with how modern desires--our lusts and romances, obsessions and addictions--are filtered through omnipresent everyday technology, there is seemingly no start nor end to the repetition. Relentlessly experimenting, the surfaces of Willmont's new paintings are layered, his unique visual language resembling a feedback loop, his patterns repeating and ever-changing, paintings within paintings echoing large-scale wallpaper installations.
Similar to one screen following another, the flatness of the artist's picture plane calls to mind the pervasive sleekness of our digital interface, his smooth surfaces representative of the idealization of perfection and rapid-fire consumption, of no longer living in the present moment nor focused on what one is experiencing.
Influenced by the digital age and our ubiquitous consumption of technology, his flowers, fragmented portraits, butterflies and water droplets are suggestive of the transient nature of lust and longing in a world now dominated by the internet, cell phones, and dating apps. Contradicting darker tropes, his paintings contain a mostly pastel palette, playing with duality and transformation such as water with fire or beautiful flowers that are poisonous.
Blurring the boundaries between commercial and fine art, the contemporary and the historical, digital and analog, Willmont's abstract works question the nature of pictorial representation, proffering a unique commentary on the universal disconnect of the digital age--desire as despair, love as consumerism, simulated perfection masking vulnerability.
Brian Willmont's solo exhibition, Mirage Mirage is on view at VICTORI + MO through October 26th, 2019.
