Demetrius Wilson: It’s Not Love, But It’s Glam

Demetrius Wilson (Born 1996, Boston) opens his first exhibition It’s Not Love, But It’s Glam at the gallery on Thursday April 6, 2023.

Wilson’s work stems from a place of personal biography and collectively shared experience. Finding both moments of stillness and activity, his work constantly adapts while it moves through pockets of the whole. Flirting with the idea of location, there is a feeling of impermanence and abstraction in Wilson’s paintings, while the colors tell stories of figures and landscapes that have yet to be concretized or revealed. Wilson describes his paintings as working through a process of displacement, and is interested in how time can be handled. His paintings do not take on the task of blending time, specifically past and present, but rather distort it so to challenge one's visual field and comprehensive capacity to identify breaks in time. Adaptation is therefore a major theme in the artist’s current body of work. Specifically, Wilson adapts through the linguistic and interpretative relationships set up by color. Color alludes to persons, but also other things, other contexts like the environment itself. Having shifted from a primarily figurative style of painting to abstraction in late 2021, Wilson often alludes to figures in the titles of his works, but more rarely in the actual composition.

‘It’s Not Love, But It’s Glam’ takes inspiration from our misunderstood position within space and time, and the beauty therein. While some of the works take from historical moments, Wilson posits time as a constant process of molding and amassing which is not necessarily cyclical and impossible to capture completely without reinventing some part of it. Risk-taking, embracing contradiction and change rather than abiding to a script is a central objective in Wilson’s practice. The artist disassembles the separation between portraiture and landscape, as the two move in and out of one another, sometimes displacing and other times creating a new place.

Wilson lives and works in New York City, with recent exhibitions including group shows at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery (2022) and Hunter MFA (2022) and a solo show at Galatea Fine Art Gallery (2020). Wilson is currently completing his MFA at CUNY Hunter College, ’24.