After Thought

Gildar Gallery is pleased to present William Stockman’s solo exhibition After Thought running September 22 – November 4, 2017 featuring all new works by the regarded artist.

William Stockman is not seeking to be clever. Rather than employ calculated irony to dissect contemporary paradox, his resolute paintings and drawings adhere to a more ancient and perhaps fundamental technology in order to embrace it. “Physical thinking” is the term the artist uses to describe his approach to knowing the world through the act of liberated yet deliberate mark-making. The results are charged images of enduring subtlety.

The exhibition's title After Thought recalls Stockman’s interest in the ephemeral, physical and emotional as essential. Like an alchemist approaching the postmodern landscape, he employs a highly developed and personal system of internal process and symbols to transform the swirl of content competing for his attention. Childhood memories, the daily news, his young daughter’s drawings, symbols of mundane labor, all resurface as elements in an ever expanding allegorical landscape.  

In his most recent works, Stockman continues his interest in the physical and psychic transmutation between drawing and painting. One series of works on panel finds the direct action of drawing in oil stick and charcoal incorporated into layers of thickly applied white and grey pigment. This build-up of image and surface, of covering and recovering content, conjures a delicate and palpable depth as objects and figures recede and emerge from gossamer fields – not dissimilar from the process of recalling of long buried memories. In a second series of panel works, Stockman reverses this relationship between media; drawing overcomes painting as simple renderings sit on top of boldly painted monochrome backgrounds. Painting retreats to become the illuminating element for evocative sketches – flash records of immediate impressions.

Wrestling through theses relationships between external and internal, drawing and painting, Stockman opens a window into the vulnerable process of discovery rather than making a statement of arrival. Fixing his gaze and ours towards the overlooked as potentially elemental, he invites consideration of that which is ineffable, and possibly even beyond thought.