Hilary Pecis: Piecemeal Rhythm

Timothy Taylor is delighted to present Piecemeal Rhythm, a new exhibition of paintings by the Los Angeles-based artist Hilary Pecis (b. 1979, Fullerton, C.A.) at 15 Bolton Street, London. Pecis paints kaleidoscopic portraits of her Los Angeles environs, spanning interior scenes, cityscapes, still lifes and landscape paintings, that draw from photographs and memories. Piecemeal Rhythm is Pecis’ first solo exhibition in the UK.

The title of the exhibition references the cadences of daily life depicted in Pecis’s paintings, where the places we inhabit and the detritus we leave in our wake are represented as a kind of souvenir of our personal histories over time. The casual disarray of intimate objects in her paintings – crumpled newspapers, books piled on a table, wilting flowers left on a windowsill or blooming under the open sky –allude indirectly to the human presence of family and friends.

‘There’s a rhythm within my paintings: each work has a certain wonky quality, a fluidity that I try to keep throughout the process. There’s much more magic in not knowing how it will all end up,’ Pecis says.

Every scene is suffused with California sunlight, which spills over lush vegetation and low-slung ranch houses, and brings a distinctly Los Angeles cast to traditional genres of painting. In her richly coloured, decorative surfaces, Pecis also invokes a history of early Modernist painting, from Matisse to Derain, and leaves clues about her influences and inspirations in the books and posters scattered through her interiors, studded with the names of artists and recognizable paintings-within-paintings.

Pecis reveals her vision of contemporary America through a lens that captures precise details: the fine script of book titles, patterns on a carpet, or pollen on a flower blossom. Her paintings have a horizontal skew, presenting everyday scenes as deliberately flattened, almost abstract, while colour and pattern become vividly exaggerated.