“It’s personal. A house is someone you know; a home is someone you love. The Japanese, on returning home, cry ‘Tadaima!' In their hallways; it’s ‘Hi Honey, I’m home!’ But addressed to the home, not to the honey… A greeting to a building, a ‘How have you been?’ to your own four walls.”

–Robert Bound

Light, privacy, sound: it has become more evident than ever that these architectural and interior conditions are as much sensorial as they are structural – implicit conductors, orchestrating everything from the way we move and feel, the work we produce, and how we communicate to the outside. For the British artist William Wright (b. Nottingham, UK, 1971), the studio interior and painting practice are irrevocably reflexive. Wright’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles at Seventh House, Quiet Days presents intimately scaled paintings in conversation with the gallery’s historic architecture: the Danziger Studio and Residence built by Frank Gehry in 1964. Recalling the still lives of Giorgio Morandi, subdued landscapes of Alfred Wallis, and graphic interiors of James Castle, Wright’s paintings take us on a tour of a home that is part real and part imagined. Invoking the studio as a personal sanctuary, Wright shares his meditations on daily life, routine, personal space, and the notion of necessity. The carefully secluded and light-filled Danziger Studio and Residence which Gehry originally intended as an artist’s live/work space – with its wood and stucco walls of double thickness, sound proof doors, and clerestory windows that never faced the street at eye level – is perhaps a temple in that regard.

Inspired by the signature Angeleno structure, Wright has adopted some of its brooding qualities, representing the skylight, kitchen, dining room, and bedroom in his own similarly reticent paintings. From a soulful distance, each is portrayed in Wright’s typically muted palette, where all extraneous detail is removed to interpret a singular point of focus and restraint, much like Gehry prioritized in his design.

In Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies, Reyner Banham recognizes European influences on the building including Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp and even likens it to “the design of studio houses in Europe in the twenties…” He states, “This elegantly simple envelope not only reaffirms the continuing validity of ‘the stucco box’ as Angeleno architecture, but does so in a manner that can stand up to international scrutiny.”

In London, despite the immense city landscape that encircles Wright’s neighborhood, the paintings, similarly to the space on bustling Melrose Avenue in which they are shown, imbue a peaceful sense of stillness and possibly timelessness. As both the artist and architect have intended, this “stucco box” and all the initial starkness and banality it represents, unfolds as a tender gift for its visitors seeking a quiet corner amidst the cacophony of our present time.