The Flat Worlds of Hilary Pecis – ryan

Winter in la, by Hilary Pecis.
Photo: Ed Mumford, Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery

The Painter Hilary Pecis has made a necessary change in her work. Her Previous Shows at Rachel Uffner – Featuring Highly Colored Landscapes, Still Lifes, and Interiors – Were lovely but felt like a decorative holding pattern. Her Current Show at David Kordansky Gallery is a breakthrough that sees her both zeroing in deeper solitudes and spiraling out intocentric reveries. It is evidence that nickens is not just just another los angeles painting selling tosty flat images. “I’m trying to figure out how to make a painting,” she told with over text. “I wish i had the confidence of a Big, Gestured Mark but alas i’m Still Always trying to like to paint.” This is the mystery at play in every artist: not to know what they doing but learning how to do it.

The new work are two-dimensional sublimits of Color, Texture, and Complexity, as if Fellow Angeleno Jonas Wood’s Large Smooting Had Been mixed with Matisse, The Pattern and Decoration PaINTERS of the 1970s (Most of Whom Woma Women), and Hallmark Greketing Cards. Dangerously enticing Territory, in Other Words.

In her best paintings, we are privy to suspended moments of Peace. In Winter in la, GET A TERRIBLE ENVY OF THE OUTWARD BEAUTY AND PHYSICAL EASE OF SOUTERN CALIFORNIA. A World Without Weather, Days Without Humidity, Lives Green With Plants. Pecis works in van gogh -like individual strokes, out of which appear chairs, a couch, a coffee table with a bouquet, and a Christmas tree – slightly incongrouous, to these east coast eyes, anyway, with the verdant and purple.

She’s great at Bookshelves. The names are like a frieze on a temple. Van Gogh, Niki de Saint Pharal, William Blake, Cézanne, Eva Hesse, Albert York, Gabriele Münter – A Declaration of the Totemic KinShips and A Family Tree of Influents. Artists live in these Pictures.

Pecis’s Paintings Become Controlled Laves Flows of Form, Shadow, and Detail. We see Photographs, A Picture of a Horse, Gridded Window Screens. In Office, there’s a microwave Supporting a cup, a thermo, and a lemon – a wee Still Life. There’s a mondrian-like order and geometry to everything, Most prominently seen in Sharon Flowers, A Decision of an la storefront. There are Vases Freshly Picked Sunflowers, Aging Brickwork, A Pocked Sidewalk. She Delights in Her Own Calligraphy, Carefully Renderying Every Letter and the Phone Number on the Store’s Sign. Everything in the painting is just so clean, down to the flowers growing atop the building.

All these moments of life painted in the flattest of ways, altars and tabernacles of our seen world. Pecis made a good move. She’s poised to really Spread Her Wings.