“Gillmore’s is a unique painterly vernacular, equally streetwise and composed. He walks an emotional tightrope between heat and cold, and these paintings contain a sense of an ultimately ecstatic ambivalence.”
“The twisting knife of a smartass remark, the threatening anonymity of a clinical evaluation, and the famous-last-words potential of pillow talk are articulated in his oeuvre with a chromaticism their ruthlessness seems to beg. Employing puns and punch lines both lewd and mawkish, and referencing cliches, board games, rebuses, barroom banter, and graffiti, his paintings are by subtle turns playful, earnest, and caustic.”
“Linked with vines of paint, the words form an overall pattern suggesting both the organic internal plumbing of the body and the mechanical plumbing of some baroque waterway.”
“As in an evanescing dream, the shapes and text fragments in Gillmore’s paintings invite interpretation and rebuff it at the same time. They remain enigmatic; evocative and elusive.”
Video - A conversation with Griff Williams at Gallery 16 San Francisco
Interview with Otino Corsano