Cruise Control Gallery presents Familiars, the debut solo exhibition of Bay Area-born, Los Angeles-based painter Arthur Wechsler. The artist conducts an epistemic experiment in ten errant images, set astray from their referents in the strong current of familiarity. Familiars is a record of memory’s work, the mutually constitutive faculties of keeping and losing, as deployed on a variety of sources—both distant past and yet becoming, real and fictional, phantasmic and objectively material.

For an LA resident of many years, the cityscape’s major features diverge from themselves, inextricable from what he adds to them. LA River, for instance, finds the image of a landscape contorted through the cumulative mediation of Wechsler’s thousands of encounters with the real site. Upon any one encounter with the river, a heap of associations—the deep sediment of past impressions—overwhelm present perception. After many visits, the river (the real thing in itself), buried under the conceptual mass which is projected onto it, is in equal measure familiar to and estranged from consciousness. And so it recedes from composition too, calling attention to the paint as such—material added to the world. A nod to impressionist and post-impressionist traditions, Wechsler insists on the fact of this material while also destabilizing the figures in a scene. Following those traditions, Wechsler’s textural compositions bear the discernable mark of his hand so as to reject a sterile distance between scene and painter. But unlike the (post-)impressionists who worked en plein air, Wechsler paints in-studio, sometimes with reference to a sketch or photograph of a scene, but often not. Paradoxically, this choice tends to emphasize an artist embedded among the scene’s objects, fixing canvas and scene in a perceptual feedback circuit—one which loosely maps the function between source and self, referent and remembrance.

Elsewhere, Wechsler rejects the (already dubious) tether to real objects completely, turning instead to dreams—a type of image whose appearance doesn’t correspond to any thing in particular. In this case, the world offers him no recourse, no river to revisit every now and then. As with successive encounters with a real world object, so too does the memory of a dream undergo recursion. To “remember” an image for the nth time is really to “remember” it as it appeared the n-1th time, and so on back until its first appearance. The nth remembrance, then, is a sort of alchemical composite of the first n-1 remembrances and the original appearance. With each iteration of this loop (each remembrance) the image suffers a contraction—the sum of singular detail whittled down, particularities buffed out, simplifying concepts imposed—while also changing qualitatively upon contact with other material—different memories, new experiences or, perhaps, an unfinished painting. In the case of Wechsler’s dream scenes, Whippet and Gnome in Inverness, the paintings-in-process were not simply a depiction or transposition of “a memory”, updated at each of its successive passes through the loop. They also constituted an external detour of the loop, both shaping and shaped by the remembered material of each pass. Their creation was the slow, iterative externalization of a mental rehearsal: memory’s recursion enacted in oils, its pigment trace borne by canvas.

With Familiars, real landscapes and stable objects receive the same pictorial treatment as transitory scenes and phantasms; all are subject to the recursive work of memory and perception, all are lost to the same extent that they become familiar. Everyday encounters with a scene stack up to ambiguate the perceptual field, while successive recollections of a fleeting hallucination subtract and stray from the inaugural appearance. Wechsler implicates both of these formulations of seeing and remembering—additive and subtractive—in one another. The crucial point is that Wechsler’s paintings do not claim to represent the image at its original encounter. Rather, those images surrender themselves to a process—a circuit of memory and perception, oscillating between tenses, in which the painting is immanent material and which, left alone, would proceed ad infinitum. In a decisive moment, Wechsler pulls the plug; the painting is done. These are the vestiges of ten broken circuits.

Text written collaboratively with Justin Scheer.