“Bill Scott: Two Decades” at Hollis Taggart, New York: Art Exhibition Review

Artist Bill Scott’s vision of the world, as relayed in his paintings that were included in the recent exhibition “Bill Scott: Two Decades” at the gallery Hollis Taggart in New York City, is entrancing and exciting.

The span of time in the exhibition’s title is the length — so far — of this gallery’s representation of Scott, and this exhibition was Scott’s tenth solo showcase at the gallery — so there’s a lot to draw from in presenting Scott’s artistic trajectory.

But the exhibition, which included recent works and art from longer ago, was strikingly unified… though richly wide-ranging in its textures. You could imagine each painting as a snapshot of a larger space-of-sorts, and the free-flowing, upbeat energy with which Scott assembled his images made that world inviting, as heightened of a reality as it seemed.

Bill Scott at Hollis Taggart

Scott utilized high saturation colors across the paintings, and the combined effect of these colors together, rolling out one after the other, was a shimmering, shining, and roaring cascade — imaginatively on par with a waterfall or an expanding field of flowers and brush.

The gallery’s own discussion of the show connects Scott’s practice to the visuals of the natural world (and the art of the late Joan Mitchell), which — though Scott’s showcased artworks weren’t strictly representational — was borne out in the billowing suite of paintings.

Both independently and collectively across the exhibition, Scott’s paintings pulsated with enrapturing vivacity, with upliftingly colored forms crashing into each other but sticking to a through line of forward movement and progress: a blossoming, which drew out propulsive, buoyant energy from shapes — sweeping lines, artfully imperfect circles, and leafy forms — that dance across Scott’s surfaces.

And within each painting, there was a lot. It was all packed to the brim with form and color, the whole of it seemingly balanced between a visage of recognizability and something further away, even esoteric in its apparent promises of a greater and expansive horizon cultivated from pieces of imagery so straightforward in isolation.

The art was high in nearly tangible energy but optimistic, capturing movement and the intermingling of object, space, and neighboring object while planting all these elements on a smoothly progressing continuum.

Though you might sometimes imagine physical form when looking at Scott’s art — whether the logistical outlines of it or the ways that such real-world forms land against each other — the result is more wide-ranging, blending both planted, physical presence and the experience of it, how standing in one place can come with so much more than the mere physical sensation of standing there.

Instead, that locus of establishing touch is awash with background experiences and rhetorically musical accompaniments pulling in what feels like every direction at once. A moment, both in Scott’s art and, I’d say, in life in general, is never just a moment, and with his dancing cascades of points and lines that build atop each other so magnificently, this expansive, sweeping tapestry moving backwards from these isolated points shines in a feeling that’s regally magisterial but everyday and accessible.

The Entire Image, Set Aglow

The images seemed like loops, showcasing touchpoints suggesting something three-dimensional but moving well beyond that — energy that logistically just did not end when moving up and down and from side to side across these paintings.

The “resolution,” time and again, was in the glowing entirety of the whole image: one circle laying against the next, gesturing towards its accompanying forms and washes of internally forceful color.

A present moment, combined with memories of the past in either that place or another, all infusing and redirecting the experience of the fleeting point in front of you. It’s all a picture of arriving to this second, this one, and the next, with an armada of inwardly propulsive, sensory experience and meeting layers upon layers of that kind of sensorial experience infused into a place and what it offers.

And though there really was, plainly, a lot in each painting, tension noticeably remained absent.

The movements from each imaged component to the next were successful leaps of faith, positioned so that the endless merry-go-rounds were reassuringly supported by the consistency. A hint of formal stability would quickly slip into a pulsating weave of merging colors and forms but would be joined by another bright, shining, painted burst arriving soon afterwards. You felt as though the paintings were going somewhere, as though the simultaneous looks at presence and its backdrop were feeding into a common objective, or at least eventual result.

Scott’s paintings merge physical experience with a particularly grand vision of the psychological trailing off behind it to the point you could even imagine the layered images as layering moments from different points in time across each other: a somehow living, breathing creature of a landscape created from the combination of diverging vantage points, visits, surrounding conditions, and inward feelings. The landscape itself, given life.

Featured image: “Bill Scott: Two Decades” (installation view) at Hollis Taggart, New York, October 17 – November 16, 2024. Image courtesy of Hollis Taggart.