Various Small Fires is elated to present Will Gabaldón’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Winter will crave what is gone follows exhibitions in Los Angeles and Seoul and marks the artist’s first presentation in Texas. The exhibition features new paintings made in the fall of 2023 and continues the artist’s long-sustained interest in landscape painting.
Gabaldóns verdant landscapes are informed by a range of sources. He cites works by Nabis painters of the late 19th century and their use of flattened space and intense colors, reflected in his compositions that verge on abstraction. The planet’s increasingly bizarre weather events seep into Gabaldon’s consciousness as he creates paintings with uncanny lighting and colored skies. The memories of physical places can forge the foundation of his scenes, but imagined locales also come into play. Emphatic brushstrokes capture both and animate the static scenes with a sense of movement. Gabaldón also notes the whimsy found in movies by Hayao Miyazaki and similarly aims to imbue personality and character into his paintings. The painter approaches his pastoral forms like figures in relationships with each other, anthropomorphized by his decisive brush work.
Always influenced by music, the exhibition takes its title from the Future Islands track “Seasons (Waiting on You)”. “I love how they mix this sense of melancholy that turns into a kind of frenzied determination,” states Gabaldón on the song that conveys the relentless repetition of time. Lush and green, the paintings come to remind viewers of the promised return of spring.
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Will Gabaldón (b. 1978 Belen, New Mexico, lives and works in Chicago) received his B.F.A. in painting from the University of New Mexico and his M.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to moving to Chicago, he lived and worked in Brooklyn. While living in New York City, he was a painting assistant for Jeff Koons, founding member of the artist-run exhibition space TSA Gallery and was actively exhibiting work in many group exhibitions in New York. He has held solo exhibitions at Ackerman Clarke, Chicago; The Journal Gallery, New York; Galería Mascota, Mexico City; Various Small Fires, Los Angeles and Seoul; TSA Gallery, Brooklyn, New York; and Harwood Art Center, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Recent group exhibitions include Make Room, Los Angeles; Venus Over Manhattan, New York; Ackerman Clarke at NADA Miami, Florida; Sanitary Tortilla Factory, Albuquerque, New Mexico; He currently lives and paints in Chicago, Illinois with his wife and two daughters.
