Nüart Gallery
670 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM
December 5-21, 2025
Opening reception Friday, December 5, 5–7 PM
In Time Dissolves Here, artist Willy Bo Richardson invites viewers to consider color as a form of contemplation. Across more than twenty chromatic paintings, Richardson’s one person exhibition explores emotional and psychological resonance, creating spatial planes that suggest both stillness and motion. The works feel both anchored and airborne, shaped by the long light of New Mexico and the disciplined restraint of a painter who knows when to intervene and when to let paint think for itself.
Nüart Gallery
670 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501
10 AM–5 PM, Daily
505.988.3888
fineart@nuartgallery.com
Driven by an avid curiosity and a profound commitment to listening and looking, Richardson’s work unfolds as an ongoing inquiry into perception. His paintings highlight optical effects and the ways in which color and gesture can reveal deeper emotional truths. Letting intuition take precedence over deliberation, he approaches painting as a physical dialogue—a direct, embodied response to color and gesture.
Color, for Richardson, operates as an emotional geometry: a system of relationships that push and pull, harmonize and collide. He explores how certain hues can soothe while others energize, striving to create combinations that evoke a balanced emotional response.
What keeps the paintings alive is their refusal to pretend that serenity comes easily. Each canvas records a contest between control and surrender. Paint blooms or fades in ways that feel both intentional and lucky. The verticals—aspirational, upright, spine-like—carry with them the memory of gravity that tugged at the liquid pigment. What looks simple is a choreography of time, patience, and that precarious moment when the painter decides not to fix what’s already working.
Richardson’s best works give the sensation of standing in a beam of light and remembering, suddenly, that light has weight. They coax you into seeing color not as decoration but as an event, unfolding right now, in your body. His paintings are less images than atmospheres: step close and the edges feather; step back and the whole thing locks into a chord. The effect is devotional without the baggage of religion. You feel invited to breathe more deeply, which is no small offer in an age that seems determined to shorten the breath.
If his art has a thesis, it’s this: attention is a form of love, and color is attention made visible. Richardson’s paintings don’t shout; they hum. They propose that looking—really looking—might still be a path to sanity. And in their quiet way, they’re right.
Richardson’s long artistic inquiry spans decades, rooted in a dedication to the act of seeing and the material experience of paint. Acknowledging a lineage of twentieth-century abstraction, his work honors the automatism of the Surrealists while distilling form to its essentials—a nod to Minimalism.
Willy Bo Richardson studied art at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Texas at Austin, and earned his MFA from Pratt Institute in 2000. After a decade in New York City, he returned to his hometown of Santa Fe. Richardson is represented by Richard Levy Gallery(Albuquerque), ClampArt (New York), Nüart Gallery (Santa Fe and Santa Monica), and Skot Foreman Gallery (San Miguel de Allende, Mexico).