Here’s just a few great paint slingers: Delacroix, Neel, Auerbach, Van Gogh, Grotjahn, Cecily, Hockney, Henry, Freud, Peyton, Ryman, Hals, Schutz, Schnabs, Lisa Y,  Monet, Manet. And yeah, I’m gonna go there and toss in Woll.

Starting in 2016, I lived with a Mt. Wilson painting of Andy’s because I was drawn to the seriousness of the play in the various yellows in the palette and the way the paint was pushed around with a quiet athleticism, an intuitive confidence. It’s that stroke, coupled with a deep understanding of color, that I’ve seen over and over in the paint slingers. It’s never the same way of course, authorship right, but always laid down with a knowing hand. Can be sharp, slashing, hard, can be fluid, lyrical, loose. And everything in between. He had a way to go then, but I saw the beginnings of something there, in the passages, percolating, stewing. It took a decade but what’s now here, before you, is a revelation.

We all have a voice inside that doesn’t make a sound but we listen to, that wonderfully meddlesome root down there that will burrow toward an idea, maybe take hold and guide us to the precipice, point us toward the leap, that place of the new, if you want it. There is no easy way when going there. Change. Process. Shift. Yeah, the mountain stroke is still there: in the corners, in the clothes, behind them. And there’s a few Wilsons hanging. But the artist is mostly melting away from the mountain as a ground to the abstract by bringing in the figure, the music now single notes not just chords. And with this new album of quintessence on the walls, Andy has done something calm and wild: Paintings showing thought.

Andy told me he doesn’t cry much but he said when these paintings leave the studio, he will tear up. I can see why; after so much intimacy with these souls, he’s brought his own tender energy and fallen in love with these people. He didn’t just create these paintings; he’s magically conjured a new kind of presence. You can sense them in their own personal abstraction. No, these are not simply paintings, they are spirits.

Portraits have been painted forfuckingever. But look, everyone up there isn’t just a representation of a person, these depictions are living, breathing, present. Except for the self-portrait, no one is looking at us, these are people contained in consciousness and dreams. They are grounded, lovingly captured in warm oils forever with an uncanniness and curiosity that is extraordinary and wonderful. Profound because they are not just flesh made into paintings but paintings of people alive and rendered in deliberate intense strokes that guide us to feel they are here in their thoughts, reflections, inside.

These are little miracles. And yes, in painting, this is what transcendence looks like.

-Jeff Poe

Night Gallery is pleased to present New Objectivity, an exhibition of new paintings by Andy Woll. This marks the artist's fourth solo presentation with the gallery.