SANTA FE, NM.- DoubleTake an exhibition of new work by William Metcalf will open at Charlotte Jackson Fine Art on May 30 and extend through June 28. An opening reception with the artist will be held on Friday, May 30 from 5-7 p.m. The gallery is located in the Railyard Arts District at 554 South Guadalupe Street.

They catch you unexpectedly, these paintings. Nearly seamless against the walls of the gallery, they come alive as you move in front of them. Color: almost limpid in its pure and glowing transparence. Acrylics painted onto cut-out geometric shapes of 3mm thick aluminum Alupanel, utilizing a minimum of colors and elegantly simple shapes, these works might at first seem uncomplicated. But something about the colors of these paintings is like falling through water. An unexpected moment of synesthesia. A visceral diffusion into color.

William Metcalf brings a collection of new pieces to DoubleTake, furthering the explorations of his work in the Transparency series, begun in 2013. This series leans into the challenges and artfulness of the two-dimensional painted surface in Art, highlighting the artifice of perspective, foreshortening, and chiaroscuro in contrast to the exaggeratedly flattened panels Metcalf utilizes. The techniques of three-dimensional illusion are on display here – but applied with the lightest touch, stripped down to their barest essentials. Non-objective, the works present geometric shapes seemingly overlaid and in contrast with one another. But as the viewer spends more time with these pieces, they may conclude that ultimately these techniques are all employed in service of a thoughtful exploration of color.


William Metcalf, DoubleTake #9, 2025. Acrylic on shaped DiBond, 50x33in.

Divested of line, the colored planes are positioned next to or overlapping one another, paired against/atop a black rectangle. The careful modulation of the color’s hues provides that lift and shadow effect that suggests transparency. The color looks as if it is being shaded by the black, or changed in hue by its overlapping with the other colored panel.

The color choices and changes sometimes lean into the illusion. For example, a piece with one ambery-orange and one muted yellow panel set next to each other “over” the black panel. The overlapping parts appear to have shifted with the dark underlay – the orange toward a burnt umber, the yellow toward an ochre-brown. In other pieces the color shifts seem to highlight the illusion. For instance, a piece with two off-set layers, one a light tan, the other a dusty blue, overlaps with a section that is a brighter, almost yellow-tan, as if the blue has had the effect of blocking the effect of the black underlayer, rather than adding to the color-shift. The different formulation is used in another piece where the layers are dusty pink (and darker mauve where the layer overlaps with black) contrasted with a similar dusty blue. Here where the color overlap occurs the shift is unexpectedly to a brighter almost bubblegum pink.

Paired with Metcalf’s pristine surfaces, which allow for an almost pellucid access to the color itself, the carefully constructed elements combine to create works of art that feel somehow more like artistic phenomena, occurring spontaneously somehow from out of the void, objects or creatures imbued with a life and purpose of their own, rather than artful constructions.

It is fascinating to speculate how Metcalf has managed to achieve this. What alchemy of paint and shape, of time and light, have combined to allow these paintings to somehow become objects unto themselves, which can simultaneously be works of art but also essays (in the original sense of to try, to attempt), phenomenological explorations into the nature of color, of light, of art?

In the end, though, it is the experience that matters most: the double take, the flip back and forth between colors as the eye moves, the internal shifting in emotion and sense that follows the eye; the initial confusion over the way a color shifts, that resolves into a sense of depth; the essential, instinctive joy at experiencing color itself.

- Michaela Kahn, Ph.D.