Will Bruno’s plein air paintings snapshot his wanderings into the western wilderness. Mauve rocky cliff sides, golden sunsets peering through voluminous clouds, soft green alpine shrubs dotting the earth; these elements come together with finesse in the here and now of Bruno’s immediate surroundings. An element of chance plays a role in these serendipitous images. A backpack full of small canvases taken on multi-day backpacking trips can come back to the studio full of majestic mountains and captured sunlight or stormy skies and decaying trees.

The history of plein air painting stems back to the inventions of the easel box and paint tubes, both of which made the act of painting in situ a more portable process. It’s a tradition that allows artists to capture the color, shade, and natural light of a stunning landscape more accurately, while also harnessing the essence and spirit of the outdoors. While Bruno’s work is a romantic extension of this age-old practice, there are ancillary forces at play here. Inspired by the peripherals of daily life, unexpected apparitions appear within Will Bruno's paintings.

Scattered lettering from candy wrapper labels, calligraphy fonts practicing the words CHAT GPT, golden hands glistening in the sun, scenes of Rip Van Winkle floating through clouds and butterflies, visions of Jesus, bells from a National Geographic advertisement, a tour of a hermit's home after a forest fire. These are the ephemera that creep into Bruno’s paintings. Hallucinatory relics that pierce his pristine scapes. The geographies of these works were found in El Rito, Plaza Blanca, Carson National Forest, Abiquiu, Hermits Peake, Calf Canyon and other parts of New Mexico. The locations are digested alongside ruminations on spirituality, origins of candy, artificial intelligence, and the life cycle of the lodgepole pine.

It is possible to view two vantages at once, in Will Bruno's case, one landscape literally on top of the other. Similarly, Will Bruno embodies two types of painters at once: one whom is in the moment and taking in a natural environment, and one who taps into a stream of consciousness and stumbles on revelations. It is this dichotomy that Will Bruno straddles: seizing the moment while also inhabiting the deep crevices of the mind, story-telling coexisting with experiential moments, reality intertwining with mirage.

Will Bruno (b. 1981) lives and works remotely and off grid in Abiquiu, NM. He holds an MFA from Portland State University. Bruno has recently exhibited in Berlin with Meyer Riegger, and in the US with Smart Objects in LA, Smoke the Moon and The Valley Taos in NM, and Patrick Parrish in NY. Will Bruno has been featured in Contemporary Art Review LA and Artcritical. He was an Artist-in-Residence through the Ford Family Foundation Grant at Sitka Center for Art And Ecology and most recently a resident at the Macedonia Institute, Chatham, NY. Midnight River is Bruno's first solo exhibition in NYC