DEMETRIUS WILSON

Light in a Dark Mirror

Opening: February 17th, 6-8 PM

February 17th - March 13th, 2026

For his second exhibition at half gallery, “Light in a Dark Mirror,” Demetrius Wilson presents a suite of new abstract paintings conceived at his Long Island City studio. The Hunter MFA shares the late Ed Clark’s opinion that “the paint is the subject,” sidestepping the anthropomorphic in favor of the crepuscular. “We are beings born in and from darkness so it’s no wonder why we find tragedy, violence and tension so attractive. But it is also in our nature to seek the light—truth, beauty, goodness,” says Wilson of his fascination with that liminal state: be it emotional or actual twilight. 

He is also obsessed with combustion as an engine for composition. “Everything is on fire in my paintings,” he continues. “What does fire do so greatly? It burns, brightly, radiating heat, infectiously.” Wilson goes beyond scale and palette to focus on the temperature of his paintings, illumination as its own force multiplier. The dancing of a pink flicker in "Consume," contrasted by the deep embers in his "Irony of Utopia." Alberto Burri used fire as a literal tool - much the way ceramicists might bisque a sculpture - but Demetrius Wilson seeks it out purely as concept, for its value as metaphoric crucible. Again to quote Ed Clark, “the real truth is in the stroke.”