MARCH 5 - APRIL 17, 2024

Opening Reception with the Artist
Tuesday, March 5TH, 5 - 7 PM

SOCO Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Day Tripper, a solo exhibition by artist Paul Wackers featuring new paintings and works on paper. The gallery will host a public opening reception with the artist on March 5th from 5 - 7 PM. This will be the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. 

A spur-of-the-moment excursion, a day trip involves little planning but much possibility. Bracketed between morning and night, the outing is brief, but a diversion from routine nonetheless—one in which the tripper sets aside real time for awareness, curiosity, and chance, even close to home.  

The paintings in Day Tripper both capture and invite a sense of the traveler’s refreshed attention. In Wackers’ vision, familiar objects are wildly reimagined through heightened color, varying textures, and a mélange of forms. The resulting compositions vibrate with organic energy, even when their subjects are static. In “Troubles at the bodega: options and wants,” vessels and houseplants sit beside painterly abstractions and hallucinatory images, emphasizing the title’s distinction between what’s available—the stuff of the concrete world—and what’s desired—the bodega’s impossible, imagined offerings.

Wackers has long shown an interest in forgoing the human figure in favor of “things,” remarking, “Once you put a person into a painting—that becomes the subject. I don’t want to do that. I like to set the stage.” By depicting settings whose human counterparts have left the building, Wackers continues the project of still life painting, in which the accouterments of daily living become symbols and ciphers for a range of ideas, emotions, and perceptive states.

The captured states on display range from the naturalistic to the altered, often within a single work, as in Wackers’ striking red monochromes and playful approach to perspective. A flattened tabletop seen from above contains forms rendered in profile, skewing the work’s spatial logic and puzzling our vantage as viewers. In Wackers’ words, these tabletops double as “maps or even board games; spaces in which actions can take place.” In “Trip Planning,” art objects and other décor direct the eye through a choose-your-own compositional adventure, wherein a bold black line enlivens the scene with suggested movement. Considered in the context of physical action, to “trip” also means to stumble; to lose one’s footing on a hidden obstacle. As in painting itself, “Trip Planning” implies that, even when following a map, only so much can be plotted beforehand.  

To the sensorily-attuned day tripper, a shelf of trinkets becomes a museum in miniature; a floral arrangement a phantasmagoric display. In paying equal attention to the micro and the macro, the real and the dreamt, Day Tripper serves as a vibrant reminder of the visual feast we live inside, if only we choose to see it.

Paul Wackers (B. 1978)

Paul Wackers was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1978. He received a BFA from Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC, and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Recent solo exhibitions include The window goes both ways at Alice Gallery in Brussels, Belgium (2023); Sounds Before the Sun Hits at Jack Hanley Gallery in New York, NY (2023); and Fresh Cut at Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco, CA (2022). Recent group exhibitions include We’re Outta Here at The Pit Los Angeles, CA (2023); Various Flowers at Hirschl and Adler Modern New York, NY (2023); Peter Böhnisch, Sophie Treppendahl, and Paul Wackers at Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, NY (2022); Earth’s Debit at Public Land in Sacramento, California (2022); Twenty Year Anniversary Exhibition at Morgan Lehman Gallery in New York (2022); and Nature Morte at The Hole in New York (2021). Wackers’ work can be found in collections including MIMA Museum in Brussels, Belgium. Wackers lives and works in New York.