WILLIAM METCALF: DOUBLETAKE
May 30 - June 28, 2025
Metcalf
They catch you unexpectedly, these paintings. Nearly seamless against the walls of the gallery, they come alive as you move in front of them. Color: almost limpid in its pure and glowing transparence. Acrylics painted onto cut-out geometric shapes of 3mm thick aluminum Alupanel, utilizing a minimum of colors and elegantly simple shapes, these works might at first seem uncomplicated. But something about the colors of these paintings is like falling through water. An unexpected moment of synesthesia. A visceral diffusion into color.
William Metcalf brings a collection of new pieces to DoubleTake, furthering the explorations of his work in the Transparency series, begun in 2013. This series leans into the challenges and artfulness of the two-dimensional painted surface in Art, highlighting the artifice of perspective, foreshortening, and chiaroscuro in contrast to the exaggeratedly flattened panels Metcalf utilizes. The techniques of three-dimensional illusion are on display here – but applied with the lightest touch, stripped down to their barest essentials. Non-objective, the works present geometric shapes seemingly overlaid and in contrast with one another. But as the viewer spends more time with these pieces, they may conclude that ultimately these techniques are all employed in service of a thoughtful exploration of color.
Divested of line, the colored planes are positioned next to or overlapping one another, paired against/atop a black rectangle. The careful modulation of the color’s hues provides that lift and shadow effect that suggests transparency. The color looks as if it is being shaded by the black, or changed in hue by its overlapping with the other colored panel.
The color choices and changes sometimes lean into the illusion. For example, a piece with one ambery-orange and one muted yellow panel set next to each other “over” the black panel. The overlapping parts appear to have shifted with the dark underlay – the orange toward a burnt
umber, the yellow toward an ochre-brown. In other pieces the color shifts seem to highlight the illusion. For instance, a piece with two off-set layers, one a light tan, the other a dusty blue, overlaps with a section that is a brighter, almost yellow-tan, as if the blue has had the effect of blocking the effect of the black underlayer, rather than adding to the color-shift. The different formulation is used in another piece where the layers are dusty pink (and darker mauve where the layer overlaps with black) contrasted with a similar dusty blue. Here where the color overlap occurs the shift is unexpectedly to a brighter almost bubblegum pink.
Paired with Metcalf’s pristine surfaces, which allow for an almost pellucid access to the color itself, the carefully constructed elements combine to create works of art that feel somehow more like artistic phenomena, occurring spontaneously somehow from out of the void, objects or creatures imbued with a life and purpose of their own, rather than artful constructions.
It is fascinating to speculate how Metcalf has managed to achieve this. What alchemy of paint and shape, of time and light, have combined to allow these paintings to somehow become objects unto themselves, which can simultaneously be works of art but also essays (in the original sense of to try, to attempt), phenomenological explorations into the nature of color, of light, of art?
In the end, though, it is the experience that matters most: the double take, the flip back and forth between colors as the eye moves, the internal shifting in emotion and sense that follows the eye; the initial confusion over the way a color shifts, that resolves into a sense of depth; the essential, instinctive joy at experiencing color itself.
- Michaela Kahn, PhD
DoubleTake #6, 2025
acrylic on shaped DiBond 50 x 33 in.
WM641
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DoubleTake #4, 2025
acrylic on shaped Alupanel
49.5 x 32.75 in.
WM635
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$9,800
$9,800
DoubleTake #2, 2025
acrylic on shaped DiBond
49.5 x 32.75 in.
WM634
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DoubleTake #5, 2025
acrylic on Alupanel
49.5 x 32.75 in.
WM637
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$9,800
DoubleTake #1, 2025
acrylic on shaped DiBond
49.5 x 32.75 in.
WM633
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$9,800
DoubleTake #10, 2025
acrylic on shaped DiBond 33 x 49 in.
WM642
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$9,800
$9,800
DoubleTake #8, 2025
acrylic on shaped DiBond
33 x 49 in.
WM640
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DoubleTake #7, 2025
acrylic on shaped DiBond
33 x 49 in.
WM638
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$9,800
$9,800
Hot Spot, 2024
acrylic on Alupanel 19 x 15 in.
WM630
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DoubleTake #11, 2025
acrylic on shaped DiBond
35 x 38.5 in.
WM645
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$7,500
Troubadour (Maquette), 2024
acrylic on shaped Alupanel 22.5 x 18.5 in.
WM626
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$2,800
$2,800
Born: 1945
Lives & works in Santa Fe, NM
Education:
A.A. Art, Orange Coast College, Costa Mesa, CA
B.A. Art, California State University at Fullerton
Selected Solo Exhibitions:
2025 DoubleTake, Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM
2019 Transparency, Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM
2013 Mindspace, Charlotte Jackson Fine Art (Reviews, Santa Fe, Summer 2013 edition, ARTnews.)
2008 The Infinity Series, Charlotte Jackson Fine Art
2007 Galeria Kreisler, Madrid Spain
2005 Point of View, Charlotte Jackson Fine Art
2004 Trinity Gallery, Atlanta Ga.
2002 Bending Space, Charlotte Jackson Fine Art
2000 The Space Between, Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Newport Beach, CA
1997 Charlotte Jackson Fine Art
1995 Charlotte Jackson Fine Art
1992 Wade Wilson Gallery, Chicago, IL
1992 Campbell Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
1989 Sena Galleries West, Santa Fe, NM
1988 Sena Galleries West, Santa Fe, NM
Selected Group Exhibitions:
2024-25 Off-Center: New Mexico Art, 1970-2000 (Spectacle), New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM
2019 Embodying Color, Museum Wilhelm Morgner, Soest Germany
2019 imprints Galerie, Drome, France
2017 ArtSpace, Wiesbaden Germany
2011 Scott Richards contemporary Art, SanFrancisco, CA
2010 Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art
2007 How the West is One, Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico
2006 Biennial Southwest, Albuquerque Museum of Art & History, Albuquerque, NM>
2006 Art and Architecture Tour - In conjunction with the Orange County Museum of Art, Laguna Beach, CA
2006 Site Unseen, Site Santa Fe
2006 Inside Eight, Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, NM
2005 Roy Lichtenstein, Chuck Close, William Metcalf, Trinity Gallery, Atlanta, GA
2005 Back to Basics, Charlotte Jackson Fine Art
2003 I-25, Sangre De Cristo Arts & Conference Center, Pueblo CO
2003 THE SHOW: A Southwest Juried Exhibition. Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico
2002 LOOKING BACK, Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico
2001 Site Unseen, Site Santa Fe
2000 TERM LIMITS, Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico
2000 Fair and Square, The Governor’s Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
Galerie Rotloff, Karlsruhe, Germany
Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM
Galery Sonja Roesch, Houston, TX
Robert McClain Gallery, Houston, TX
Galeria Joan Prats, New York, NY
Gallery K, Washington, D.C.
Allene Lapides Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
Taos Connections Gallery, Denver, CO
Beverly Gordon Fine Art, Dallas, TX
New Gallery, Houston, TX
Tavelli Gallery, Aspen, CO
Selected Public & Private Collections:
Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Collection Panza di Biumo, Varese, Italy
The Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, NM
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ
Vladem Contemporary Museum, Santa Fe, NM
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
IBM, Dallas, TX
United Bank, Dallas, TX
Atlantic Records, Los Angeles, CA
Northwestern College, St. Paul, MN
Allyen and Bacon Publishing, Boston, MA
Coppens Records, Amsterdam, Netherlands
DMB&B, Los Angeles, CA
Mr. Gene Hackman, Santa Fe, NM
MC Hammer, San Francisco, CA
Dr. Mark Spitz, Los Angeles, CA
Mr. Bobby Unser, Albuquerque, NM
Captain Alan Villiers, Los Angeles, CA
Captain Irving Johnson, Los Angeles, CA
Captain Dwight Long, Los Angeles, CA
