The New Criterion

The Helen Miranda Wilson exhibition at Jason McCoy included twenty-three small paintings of clouds. Wilson's clouds recede in space, spread out in a flurry, float placidly, or cluster ominously at the top of the painting. In a few of the pieces we see evidence of terrestrial phenomena—a bird here, wind-blown leaves there—but, for the most part, the paintings are of the heavens' themselves. (That we are left groundless, so to speak, reminds us of just how much we have invested in gravity.) Each image is based in observation of the most nuanced sort—anyone who dates her paintings according to the month has a stake in how time and season change the quality of light. Wilson is particularly good at capturing the improbable range of colors that occur in the sky. The greenish blues and internal light of the yellowish clouds in Angels Running (1997) are crystalline and virtuosic. Yet Wilson’s virtuosity is predicated in propriety and the surfaces of her paintings aren't showy. They're magnetic. We're drawn into a spatial and chromatic experience that is undeniably beautiful.

Beautiful, one might add, and intense. The small size of the paintings works to dislocate our conception of scale. The actual immensity of the subject is in contrast with the blunt, boxlike formats of the pieces themselves. The paintings are as pressurized as a bottle of seltzer. There is something clinical about Wilson's manner, as if she were preserving clouds rather than painting them. The result can't be called Surrealist, but it does suggest the hallucinatory; the ragged whirl of clouds in Hidden Moon for instance, veers toward the psychedelic. Even though the works containing precisely rendered moons and stars become too literal, too precious, I can't get, the exhibition out of my mind. Wilson's unearthly paintings made for one of the strongest shows of the season.