Artist: Will Duty

The Painting Center presents The Weight of Light, a solo exhibition by Will Duty in the Project Room.

The Weight of Light features a new body of black-and-white oil paintings that expand on Duty’s exploration of abstraction, perception, and restraint. Known for his abstract noir sensibility—embedding geometric forms into fields of black—Duty now inverts that relationship, introducing luminosity and open tonal range into his visual language.

The transition from graphite to oil feels inevitable: the metallic density of lead giving way to the slow viscosity of paint. What was once heavy and opaque becomes atmospheric and responsive. In a subtle departure, forms are now embedded into white or gray grounds, allowing light to serve not as background but as substance. Two key works, A Pair of Rays (Inversion I & II), literalize this shift—transforming shadow into illumination.

Across the exhibition, two distinct scales unfold. Larger canvases engage with geometric abstraction—zigzagging forms and angular divisions rendered through finely modulated gradients that act as color surrogates. The tension between precision and softness gives the works a restrained lushness, as though radiance itself were the subject. In contrast, a group of smaller paintings turns toward the human form, exploring intimacy through chiaroscuro. Together, they form a conversation between the monumental and the personal, the architectural and the bodily.

Duty’s practice is guided by a paradoxical pursuit: minimalist goals achieved through maximalist means. Each work seeks resolution as a single visual idea—concise, disciplined, and self-contained, echoing the logic of a Sol LeWitt instruction or a haiku.

The Weight of Light suggests that simplicity is not absence, but concentration—that illumination carries its own gravity.