Ceysson and Bénétière is pleased to announce, The rich hour, a one-person show by Wallace Whitney. The paintings are brightly-hued, energetic abstract works that are built with layer upon layer of strokes, slashes, and daubs of both oil and acrylic paints—and are often wet-on-wet. He employs pigments and stretchers made by hand alongside improvised instruments for adding color such as widened brushes and squeegees or sheets soaked in paint that result in broad, spirited swipes across the canvas in addition to stencils and spray paint. In conceptualizing his work, Whitney draws on a diverse range of painterly predecessors including Cy Twombly’s historically informed yet intuitive mark-making, Joan Snyder’s politically charged and tactile use of gesture, and the Support/Surfaces artists’ Marxist idealism and guerilla-style exhibitions of abstract painting. Building community with other makers is not only foundational and nourishing to his painting practice but an extension of it. Whitney understands painting to be political and a vital space for working through ideas. Each mark and application of color are deeply considered and imbued with potential meaning or not, offering the beholder a viewing experience defined by intellectual and formal pleasure.

Whitney’s process is slow-going, defined by a practice of gradually building up the painted surface over time. He endeavors to implement a kind of lengthened looking, letting the piece direct its own making and little by little arriving at an understanding of his composition as the weeks and months pass. Often, the first mark is visible alongside the last, making the canvases chroniclers of their own making, containing a history of both the artist’s decisions and non-decisions. These strata in the painted field frequently contain contrasting colors and marks that evoke distinct tempos and affects. Whitney understands his layers as screens or scrims that enable a viewer to see one thing through another, such as orange through blue, or hazy against solid, or aggression neighboring tenderness. He imagines this painted space to be navigable, made up of gestures and forms that not only guide an observer through, but open up new experiences by adjusting their viewpoint.

Whitney conceptualizes each painting as a unique experience, working at various scales and in different palettes rather than completing a series of similar pieces. Accordingly, this new body of work contains large 90-by-76-inch compositions, petite tondi, monoprints and portrait-sized canvases (a new size for the artist). The artist sees the communicative potential of these variations in size as akin to pieces of writing (indeed, Whitney’s own decades-long writing practice is inextricably enmeshed with what he paints in the studio). Whitney considers his larger paintings to function more like essays, full of passages of covering and uncovering such as in Violet sunday, 2025 in which skeins of chocolate brown encroach on brushy patches of lavender while angular strokes of deep blue give geometric shape to otherwise unbound passages of color. The artist sees his smaller pieces as fragments, or more concise thoughts. In Tappan Zee, 2025 slashes of phthalo green contrast with atmospheric yellows, blues and brown that recall fragmented vistas seen through manmade structure. Whitney’s recent paintings draw on the environment and landscape of his home near a boatyard in the Bronx, at the outer edge of the city. Whitney sees his waterfront sojourns and the specificity of place as constitutive of his work. Inspired by artists with such localized sensibilities, Whitney understands his works as records of perception and experience. With his contrasting surfaces and tactile explorations of weight and lightness, Whitney allows the experience of looking to be one in which the painting slowly comes into being.

Wallace Whitney (b. 1969) was born in Boston, MA and lives and works in New York, NY. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Ceysson & Bénétière, New York, Saint Étienne, Paris, and Geneva; Soloway, Brooklyn, American Contemporary, New York; and Horton Gallery, New York, among others. He has held teaching positions at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Philadelphia. His curatorial projects include Unfurled: Supports/Surfaces 1966–1976 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2019) and Feed the Meter, Vol. I and II at Ceysson and Bénétiere, Windhof, Luxembourg (2015, 2018). Whitney is a co-founder of the artist-run gallery Canada. He received his BA from Hampshire College in 1994 and MFA from Bard College in 2001.