Edward Walton Wilcox: Though You Slay Me | This exhibition serves to reaffirm that Wilcox represents the continuation, if not evolution of the multi-talented Renaissance man, achieving an absolute mastery of craftsmanship across a vast swathe of mediums and disciplines. Though his Gothic and almost archaic technique betrays a romantic affinity for the legacy of his craft, without a doubt Wilcox brings us something new, captivating and disquieting.
If one squeezed the collected works of Edgar Allen Poe hard enough to transmute words into paint and meld this essence with the stark piety of the Dutch masters, then you’d have something fairly close to Wilcox’s vision for Though You Slay Me. Thematically and actually, darkness is all pervasive. It saturates his palette of amber tints, ember reds, sulfur yellows, decaying sepia tones; it manifests itself in the form of dilapidated windmills, the looming mortality of skeletons, and beautiful things rendered unsettlingly.