“IMAGES ARE HIGHLY FABRICATED INVENTIONS”

PAUL WINSTANLEY, Walkway, 2026 oil on linen 72.44 x 90.55 inches Courtesy 1301 PE

1301PE  Los Angeles  March 2026

“The images, the paintings, are always  extraordinary; the reality, even when similarities remain, bears almost no relationship to them.“

From: Paul Winstanley, 59 PAINTINGS, London, Art/Books, 2018 

Here I am, as the painter wrote, “the artists gets out of the way and leaves the viewer where once he stood.” I know Walkway is an image he reworked many times, each time a different painting in sync with a new state of his awareness of what he is doing. I use the present, as a sort of absolute time, separate from the fullness of things in which we loose the sense of our most intimate perception, and time steals our days. As I stand in front of the painting something from inside me is sucked in toward the silence of the white square at the end of the tunnel, so intense it is scary. The painting is, not the real physical place. Other humans have been there and marked their presence in graphic signs. The skin of the tunnel bears tattoos. Only in the painting they are indelible. But an un-human, vaguely pink-brown fog fights with the clarity of the white end. Forget reading. Only my soul can slide through the artist’s mental fog, and mine, maybe ours, in this damned 2026, where reason has lost her way.  “life seeps in unintentionally, subliminally”  (PW)

PAUL WINSTANLEY, House in the Mountains, 2025 oil on linen 87.01 x 60.24 inches Courtesy 1301 PE

‘Surface, translucency, light and space are all as one; they are indivisible. … a pure idea of the physicality  and illusion of the painting.”  (PW)

On the wall, in the gallery, “ the subject of the painting  has ceased to be the walkway or the trees but was instead the painting’s own mediation of these things.” (PW)

What I write here makes sense when we are in front of the painting, the 87 x 60 inches of a window whose semitransparent curtain filters the outside scenery and remakes it intensified on the floor. My brain, at first, was seeing nuances of gray as the dominant colors. My eyes were mimicking the curtain, tricky as they are. I stayed still for a while, waiting: and colors come to me. As if the painting was waking from sleep. It was such a wonderful sensation that I liked to believe it was true for a second, a magical mutation. The one who was asleep was my brain, slowly making the colors out of the waves of light hitting the receptors at the door of my eyes. I am old, no surprise. You wrote it at page 94, dear artist, “ Self-irony, or knowingness, is always present as part of nostalgia, even when we are tempted to think it is not.”

The viewer needs it as much as you. I continue to see the light blue and the pink in the sky that gives to the painting a vaguely luminous area taking off from the top of the trees, as if the end of foliage was a landscape line. The profile of earthly creatures. I want to be a bird in that sky.  

PAUL WINSTANLEY Stairwell 2, 2026 oil on linen 64.96 x 43.31 inches Courtesy 1301 PE

“My paintings consist of the color they need to be, for their own purposes.” (PW)

That’s a place that only exists in its painted form. Fabricated from photographs. Anonymous, enclosed inside a building, giving room for stairs or elevators, the place nobody pays attention to. Worse, the unidentified place in which humans are usually anxious, moving with haste, they can’t wait to reach some where else. The painting instead has erased all the unsettling feelings. It’s clean, almost soft. Green and pink diluted by light are the colors it needs to be. To be alive with hopes, expectations, angles and surfaces that bring to my mind an idea of transfiguration of architectural elements into a place filled with gentleness, silence, vertical breathing. Is it an organism? Really I don’t know why, the image of an unfolded body crossed my neurons. 

PAUL WINSTANLEY, STASI, 2026 oil on panel 17.72 x 23.62 inches Courtesy 1301 PE

Smaller, surprising, in this almost romantic sequence of curtains in an oblique line, hiding more than revealing both the outside and the inside, the painting is a physical questioning, an oblique line of protection: dangers might be either inside or outside, please curtains, save us from harm. Veils are delicate, beautiful, seductive. Upper and lower space are two different dark browns, as if the earth was feeding them with strength. We can merge within the folds, and disappear. 

 “Focus on the mediation of experience rather than experience itself may, more properly,  represent the world in which we now live.” (PW)

PAUL WINSTANLEY, Bathroom Mirror 2, 2026 oil on panel 17.72 x 23.62 inches Courtesy 1301

Desperate splendor of severed flowers and branches, before they fade and die. A quite penumbra, like in a house with the curtains closed in the afternoon, brushes petals and leaves giving them a mid color, temporary, and smooth. In the painted mirror the most unrealistic reflections recompose the scene, once more enchanting with colors. Images are pushed into the foreground by a steady barrier of brown and blue. Trompe l’oeil, it’s fun. Flowers and leaves recreate their own artificial environment. The artist reads their wishes and makes them happy. 

“The painting is a picture of something, though of what is not entirely clear.” (PW)