Hoffmann + Maler + Wallenberg is pleased to announce Painted Protocols, a solo exhibition by James Collins (b. 1972, Superior, Wisconsin). The show features a series of twelve paintings, all made since 2022.

Sometimes Collins’s paintings draw you in; other times they slap you away. Mysterious textures, achieved through an almost assembly-line process, achieve a harsh beauty of soft hues and jagged scratches. In Emerald, a rumpled texture resembling sheets invites a rest; in Pulse, flat, aggressive swaths of moiré lines snap your head back; in Leviathan, seductive smoke rings hover in the space just in front of a dark, oily surface.

Collins is based in Detroit, and his unconventional art-making process mirrors the Midwestern lockstep of mass-production innovations and fine art’s evolving conversation with modernity, fostering a century-old symbiosis born out of refined aesthetic ideals and mechanized production. The artist’s goal is not solely to create new imagery but to entice the paintings to live as gestures of their own making.

As in the production of different makes and models of automobile, Collins creates endless variations around four main aesthetics: gesture, line, surface, and color. For some works, oil and acrylic are applied such that the two disparate elements repel each other and separate; in others, thinned oil paint is applied liberally to the canvas, then removed in a single, sweeping gesture to yield a completed work. Collins uses custom tools—including household items like shower curtains, rags, and plastic wrap—to guide and direct his materials, yielding unique and unpredictable impressions.

Collins’s understated palette resists overwhelming, maximalist, splashy effects. Indeed, the works offer a sense of quiet and space in which the din of clanking machinery—be it of the assembly line or the creative process—is refined into a discreet hum that hypnotizes and intrigues.