Passerby

About

After graduating from School of Visual Arts (New York),
Wyatt Mills has since exhibited work in multiple solo and group shows in Los Angeles, New York, and Miami. After working for two months of living and working in Berlin, he has developed a new body of work, titled 'Passerby'.

Mills portraits are focused on the establishment of an identity and the process that leads to the outcome. The layers upon layers of transforming paint are a visual reflection of the dynamic experiences and perceptions which compile themselves to make or change a person. There are flickering moments of static reality amongst a sea of abstraction, resembling an effort to remember a passing stranger. A single brush stroke has the power to change the mood of a subject or even it's entire appearance and demeanor - just as memory could form a false depiction of a person. Each piece offers a glimpse of a personality, offering just enough information for the viewer to puzzle together the rest. Mills aims to glorify the mundane and heighten our awareness of the wonderful abstracted perceptions our every day moments. 

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Wyatt Mills is an American artist who is currently working and living at our art-space in Berlin .

” All painting is an accident. But it’s also not an accident, because one must select what part of the accident one chooses to preserve” .
Francis Bacon claimed it in order to explain how his subjects have been developed thanks to mental procedures.

Wyatt is a worthy heir to that transformation of the human form, of an analytical development in penetrating and expressing the anthropoid condition in its ruthless nakedness, without rhetoric or artifices. After attending the School of Visual Arts (New York), he began to investigate – with a surprising maturity and judgment – the reality, deconstructing the geometry for a humanistic purpose, by nailing the individual to a sweet and clear physiognomy of signs and lines.

“My art, my matter is a mechanism of memorization. It is an active and fluid process to personify a dialogue”

This dialogue, this desire for communication, takes place not only within his works, but, even, through the encounter with the public. There is a deep awareness in mixing as much the matter as the various personalities of the ‘being’. Mainly using oil and collage on canvas, Wyatt Mills orchestrates a mute symphony of subjects who apparently have no form or body. They are an attempt so “human, all too human” to understand our humanity, our vital reflection in front of a messy and chaotic world. The intrinsic necessity of the artist itself to remember something, to block – spatially and not temporally- a segment of individuality, a tramp particle conceived by history, a piece of a cardboard and, lately, the matter which is both female and mother.

“My bodies are not static. They love change”

In this way, Wyatt claims that his procedure is continually hampered, interrupted, and thus improved, by the flow of consciousness. Androgynous bodies are immersed in a planetary wheel in which, declaring their vitality, they fluctuate so precisely ordered and disciplined, just as some parts of their body (hands, eyes, lips). Wyatt’s artworks do not speak. They think and therefore they are. Wyatt Mills responds concretely to a great contemporary desire: “Who we are when we are thinking?”

- Valerio Mazzetti Rossi
Art Curator