Josh Lilley is delighted to present The Wreathed Trellis, the debut exhibition at the gallery by London based painter William Wright (b.1971, United Kingdom).

Wright’s paintings meticulously explore and carefully archive the objects that populate his studio and home. From fruit to flowers, open windows and stubbed cigarettes, his chosen subjects map a steady record of observation, the passing of time. In his hands, each item is distilled down to its inherent objecthood through an economy of line and solidity, its essence made dense in paint.

Executed over many months, Wright’s compositions are layered through a multiplicity of delicate deliberations that form the bedrock on which the final rendering is ultimately built. There is time in the surface of each canvas, a texture of accretion that underlines the rigour at the dense heart of his work.

Distilling over time allows for the slip and glide of memory into imagination, observation into association. And so the phrasing of an object becomes accented by the union of the canon; a skull here, a timepiece there, the language of the domestic bleeding into art historical trope and tradition. As subjects are revisited they also accumulate additional character specific to the playful logic of Wright’s practice, furnishing them with an air of friendly familiarity as the viewer’s ritual of looking mirrors the artist’s ritual of making.

The exhibition’s title takes inspiration from John Keats’ poem Ode to Psyche, a meditation on the mysterious power of the creative mind. Just as Keats's verse forms a conduit to the transcendent power of beauty and imagination, Wright’s paintings elevate the sublunary into the realm of the art historical collective consciousness, drawing a continuum between painting of the past and a still life of the present.