Pulp Fictions Aside, Tom Walton is a Serious Painter
Tom Walton’s paintings, a series of interiors, are on view in his current solo exhibition titled Recent at The Parlour Gallery. There’s a perceptible correlation between the historic interior of the gallery—presumably once the building’s parlor—and the illusion of domestic space within the paintings. Paused in the doorway, my own physical presence quietly correlates with the stillness of the figures, standing, lying down, and seated in the two large canvases on the gallery’s largest wall. The repeated appearance of certain furniture—a chair, a mirror, a picture on the wall—suggest these paintings are narrative, so I circumnavigate the room rather than heading for the work I’m most drawn to.
To the left of the doorway is a modest-sized horizontal oil painting titled Looking In. A woman, seated, is looking down at a small box that rests beside her on the couch. She is opening the lid of the box from which a light glows supernaturally orange. It’s the conspicuous main event of the painting, a Pulp Fiction briefcase moment. And like the unseen glowing contents of Marsellus Wallace’s briefcase, it’s a MacGuffin, an object that moves the story but has no definable meaning. This glowing recipe box is a crowd-pleasing moment for the faction of the crowd that likes pizazz, a spark of the surreal to liven up the serious tone of a painting that has all the attributes of Realism.
But while the heavy-handed device of a glowing focal point may send some viewers on a symbolic goose chase, it has a second, more interesting function. It suggests that the true focus of the work is in the medium itself, the infinite vocabulary and fantastical potential of painting. In Pulp Fiction, the glowing box could represent “movie magic.” In Looking In, it’s painting magic—the ability to upend a realistic scene with a few brushstrokes.
The box casts a dank yellowish glow on the woman’s blue-green shirt. The ochre yellow is strangely incongruent with the phosphorescent orange coming from the box, and the brush strokes are clumsy in the context of such capable painting. This phrasing of paint calls attention to something about the nature of painting, the missteps, the constant trial and error. Walton could have redacted or revised this awkward passage if he wanted to. I suspect he left it there as a provocation, a glitch. The practice of including “errors” in finished work appears throughout history in art forms as diverse as Navajo weaving and Roman mosaics, where the maker deliberately inserts imperfections to maintain humility, or to honor the divine.
The woman opening the glowing box may provide the narrative focal point of the painting—and these are narrative paintings—but a few inches to the left, I spot the real drama in the piece: the use of paint, the struggle and pleasure of articulating the blue and white pattern in this particular section of the couch. Moving from painting to painting, we see the same figure seated on a mattress covered with a blue sheet, her hand resting alongside a small picture, seemingly a photograph of a child. Then the woman is lying on her side on the blue sheet, a male figure standing, looking down at her. Then, she is seated in a chair holding an infant. Walton is courteous with his human subjects, almost stiff, and they reciprocate with physical rigidity and distant expressions. The job of the figures in these paintings is to establish the suggestion of story and the dispassionate mood. I find myself not looking at the people in these paintings, but at the paint itself.
The painting Chair 2 lets us witness Walton’s painterly vocabulary without humans, though vertical orientation alludes to the standing presence of the unseen painter and his proxy, the viewer. The palette, consisting of sensibly mixed colors, is grounded in a salmon-colored underpainting, seen at the edges of the canvas and in miniscule seams where one object meets another. Despite the singular title, there are two chairs, one in the foreground and one in a mirror’s reflection. Empty chairs in pictures refer to both presence and absence, calling attention to a space once occupied, now abandoned. Mirrors in paintings are reminders that painting is an illusion, as is, in a sense, all optical experience. In the upper right of the canvas, in the distance of the reflection, there is a red metal trash can with a lid, an “oily waste can” familiar to oil painters. This is a subtle IYKYK moment and another indication of the show’s “aboutness,” which is to say it’s a show about painting and the painter’s process.
Tom Walton’s paintings evoke the formal logic of Edward Hopper and John Koch, two masters of American Realism known for depictions of interior spaces staging deadpan domestic drama. But Walton’s compositions include surreal moments and painterly glitches that color outside the lines of straight realism. These deviations, like Tarantino’s films, create an alternate realism, a cohesive world where the form—painting—overlays the realistically depicted subject.
The title Recent, along with the fact that all six paintings in the gallery are dated 2025, allows us to calibrate the speed of the work, which is also revealed in the layers and tempo of the brushstrokes. These are small facts to be enjoyed by fellow painters. When we spoke, the artist told me that all the paintings were completed in his studio, situated in the same Camp Street building as the gallery.
I applaud the subtle and deliberate minimalism of the installation. The paintings are floated in innocuous white box frames that don’t call attention to themselves and don’t hide the edges of the paintings. There is a noticeable blankness in the gallery, no added-on installation elements that sometimes look like an apology for the fact that it’s “just” a painting show. Recent is a painting show, straight up—no distracting labels, no merch, no actual or metaphorical lollipops to distract viewers from unadulterated looking at serious paintings, serious art.
There’s one painting in the hallway, Chair, dated 2024, a year before the others: a sentry, or exiled from the work in the gallery. Empty of figures, it shows the blue chair that appears in other paintings. A perfect intro and outro to the show, there are no other objects in the painting, just pigment and oil coaxed into the shape of a chair, the absence of a figure, and the mood of a room.
Photo by Emily Farranto: Looking In, 2025, Oil on linen
