Opening Reception: Saturday, November 7th from 6:00 – 9:00pm
On Exhibition: November 7th, 2026 – January 9th, 2027
In Bed, Oil, oil pastel, oil stick, graphite on canvas, 46.5 x 63 inches, 2026
John Taylor Wagner presents Salmon & Coffee, eleven paintings, four drawings and one installation, spanning 2025 and 2026, that follow impulse. A painting begins as mental imagery, caught unresolved and set down in graphite on paper, unplanned, and if questions remain, he’ll explore them on canvas. Wagner plays with color, negative space, and the angles that steer the eye: where it lands, what pulls it in, what nudges it away, and where it is held in place.
The paint brush is a means to study human emotion, and each painting becomes what it uncovers. These are painterly paintings, alive with action and movement in a flattened world. The artist’s hand is felt throughout, in the pace and gesture of the making and the various textures and weights. The act of painting is as present as the thing painted.
“The paintings that are resolved or understood are often the least interesting to me. I am constantly fielding the visual notions that cross my mind, and the ones I choose to capture are the ones I don’t understand. It’s not that I misunderstand them but rather a being with, a holding of the not understanding. And that being with means it’s also not something I am looking to unpack or solve. I want it to stay.”
Amid a celebratory palette looms a quiet pulse of dissociative discomfort. The figures’ feelings are at capacity, while their emotions remain unexplained. Life wobbles and suspense hangs in the balance; even the figures don’t know what they will feel next or what they might do in response. One figure’s blind eye is another’s wry wink.
Consider this an invitation in, to lead with the senses, not the mind.
About the Artist:
John Taylor Wagner (b. 1985, Maitland, Florida) grew up traversing the United States, and drawing was one of the few constants of his childhood. As an adult, he spent nearly a decade on the Front Range of Colorado, where he learned to paint. He now lives and paints in Los Angeles.
Wagner works from spontaneity and gut, relying on instinct. He brings ephemeral visions to the canvas before they can be overthought and wrung dry. His paintings play with color, open fields of space, weight, and levity, and they are populated by figures and creatures who escape none of it. Humanity’s complexity emerges not only through gesture and expression but also through humor, bold colors, and obscure forms. The result is unprocessed artifacts of feeling: bright, loose, raw, droll, and curious.
Wagner is committed to painting as a way of understanding human experience, and is honored to be in conversation with the predicament of existence.
Interior, Oil and oil stick on canvas, 46.5 x 57 inches, 2025