Art Review: William Gaucher “Survived by Sights”
January 16 - March 7, 2026, Theta Gallery, NYC
This is a splendid show of thoughtful paintings. Most of them are single images, all are beautifully rendered. I was lucky to see the work at Theta Gallery before the show closed in early March. I like Theta. Despite being in Tribeca, it maintains a serious and fun spirit of “let’s put on a show!” You feel everyone is pulling together to make magic happen. To access the basement gallery you must walk down a set of steep narrow steps into (drumroll) a bright and cheery, long rectangular space where the floorboards creak in musical tones and the vestiges of former businesses have been unified by a coat of white paint on the walls and black paint on the floor.
It is an intimate and fitting venue for William Gaucher’s quietly dramatic work. The oil on canvas paintings are a comfortable size for the space. They range from the smallest, “Teddy,” 2025 at 25-⅝ x 19-¾ inches to the largest, “Heron,” 2025 at 38-¼ x 47-¼ inches. They are painted in somber tones but the handling and imagery don’t read as gloomy. Instead, I had the sense that the darkness indicates density. The central images referred to in the paintings’ titles emerge on the picture plane from the experience of peering through the fog of convention and habit. Gaucher tests the loci of where abstraction totters on figuration.
Many artists’ work considers how a subject affects its environment and how in turn that environment acts upon the subject. For example, in Wanda Gág’s world the objects depicted, as well as their shadows and the atmosphere surrounding them, all demonstrate that they follow the rules of the particle theory of matter. Everything is made up of particles that are constantly in motion and attract each other across the spaces between them. In Alberto Giacometti’s figures, one gets the sense that the environment has impinged on the figure to the degree of leaving only the barest essence. Yet, what is left in turn radiates a power of suggestion forcefully outward affecting its immediate environment. Particles and waves. I see both kinds of dynamic exchanges operating in Gaucher’s work.
Compositionally, “Teddy” is similar to most of the works in the exhibition. A central, iconic image is clearly delineated while it both merges with and hovers above the atmospheric ground. The subject is charmingly rendered: a dark triangle of a nosetip on a white muzzle clues you into the mark that can only be a black button eye; the roundness of the bear ears and paws all read classic toy. The foreshortening of the closer left leg tells a story. An action has taken place. The bear has fallen or been abandoned. Or is it dancing? The illusion of depth is reinforced by the dark colors of the background. Those cool purples wash over the bear’s warmer oranges and yellows, staining it but not consuming it. The image has a bit of the feeling of Vitruvian Man as well as a crucifixion. It makes me want to laugh but also look over my shoulder.
While the composition of “Year of the Crab” also has a central figure, it doesn’t have the same atmospheric merging between the background and the iconic figure as the other paintings in this exhibition. This work reads as a landscape divided between a dark lower ground and a lighter top. In the middle is a monster with waving pincers. Without knowing the title, I first thought it might be a scorpion. Then I saw that the surface was bedazzled with rhinestones that had been painted the same as the background. The transformed rhinestones lose their luster but retain their jewel-like shapes and now read as bubbles. This device unifies the bottom and top halves and places us underwater with a crab. It’s a novel approach to playing with figure and ground. The coloring of the crab is a beautiful mottle of water palette pastels. Its form is definite, but the blurring acts as a camouflage. For all of its visual pleasure, it can also be the thing of nightmares. I read a theory that Amelia Earhart was eaten by giant crabs. I don’t know if anyone else would have that exact thought looking at this painting, but I’m sure that Gaucher’s work will make both your mind and eye wander to interesting places.
Theta Gallery
184 Franklin Street, Lower Level
New York, NY 10013