The Paintings of Bill Weiss
February 6 to March 8, 2003
Elizabeth Harris Gallery
Small Events
"If you could make a painting every day of your life, what would it look like?"
This is the question asked by Bill Weiss when I met him to discuss his new body of work. These simple paintings are rich in incident and generous in their capacity for delectation. It's a seemingly straightforward affair: biomorphic and geometric shapes or irregularly cut wooden panels. Irregular edges of the support are contrasted by the depicted shapes on the interior of the visual field. Weiss' vocabulary is hardly academic. He mixes a rich vocabulary of tear like shapes with trapezoids and rectangles; traces of the biological function against rigid architectural structure. The artist creates a new world where approximation equals confluence and logic is only useful as analogy. The passage of time, the small non earth-shaking events of daily life are marked and examined with aplomb.
Joel Silverstein, 2003