Udaya
Francois Ghebaly, Los Angeles, CA
June 20th, 2024- July 20th, 2024
In his newest exhibition, Udaya, Mills looks to test the physical and expressive limits of his chosen medium, oil paint, in the process reflecting on faith and introspection. Across ten paintings and a breadth of formal and technical approaches, he explores ideas of density and sedimentation, the cumulative effect of small things that build–whether figuratively, psychologically, or literally–into monolithic forms. Paint applied to surface, the rudimentary building block in this process, becomes a pivotal symbol in the work and in Mills’s practice at large, quite literally concretizing the artist’s hand and journey along the forward march of time. “I think it's very important in art that the artist is allowed the room to dive deep into himself,” he holds. “By doing that work the artist becomes extremely vulnerable to a point that others can find themselves in that same moment, in that same ambiguity that he’s located in himself and on the canvas.” -Wes Hardin
Gethsemane
Oil On Wood Panel, Triptych, 120"x192", 2024
Ecija
Oil On Wood Panel, 80"x80", 2024
Lacaene
Oil On Wood Panel, 80"x80", 2024
Qhelia
Oil On Wood Panel, 80"x80", 2024
Chaelan
Oil On Wood Panel, 80"x80", 2024
Circles
Oil On Wood Panel, Triptych, 36"x84", 2024
Concerto's Phantasi
Oil On Wood Panel, 36"x36", 2024
Aisatsana
Oil On Wood Panel, Triptych, 24"x58", 2024
Aune Majid
Oil On Wood Panel, Diptych, 24"x24", 2024
Aunen
Oil On Wood Panel, Triptych 24"x30", 2024The exhibition title Udaya draws from the Sanskrit root for ‘dawn’ or ‘rising’ and gestures toward hard-learned principles of devotion, tribulation, and actualization that underpin the work. In paintings like the colossal Gethsemane, whose title references the Garden of Agony in the Christian Bible, Mills’s painstakingly-built polychrome impasto adds up in rippling masses to confront a sense of monumentality teetering on the geologic or celestial. -Wes Hardin
Scattered throughout Udaya are examples of Mills’s signature triptych form, which considers religious and art historical ideas of trinity, as well as the unique formal opportunities created by arranging and contrasting separate, sometimes conflicting components in a single compositional unit. In the triptych works Aunen (2024) and Aisatsana (2024), densely impastoed passages directly border and compress other segments of spacious, vaporous color. Many of Mills’s artwork titles directly mimic this approach, where letter pairings are invented and recombined by the artist in a type of free-association that transposes his same painterly, devotional sense into sound and air. In each case, the effect is one of elongation, encouraging prolonged interaction to take stock of each work’s constituent or opposing elements–time, space, color, mark–and the many truths therein.
-Wes Hardin