Yet their abstraction is deceptive. Wilson constructs these compositions from an archive of existing images: fragments of Old Master paintings encounter his own photographs and images drawn from contemporary visual culture. Sources are layered, displaced, enlarged, obscured, and collapsed into one another until their original contexts become difficult, if not impossible, to retrieve. Art history is present less as a repertoire of quotations than as sediment.

The exhibition’s figurative works approach the same question from the opposite direction. The small paintings grouped under the title Suggested for You derive from images proposed to Wilson by Instagram’s algorithm. Wilson describes his amazement at “a digital footprint of behavior that is then mirrored with images back to you,” asking whether this constitutes “an image ideology in itself—or the death of such.”

For centuries, institutions and patrons helped establish a hierarchy of subjects and genres: which bodies merited representation, which animals could signify nobility or savagery, which objects might embody wealth, knowledge, faith, or power. Wilson’s creatures knowingly inhabit this history. The wild boar and the domestic pig may be taxonomically close, yet Western visual culture has burdened them with markedly different associations. Today, such inherited codes coexist with a radically different apparatus of selection: the algorithm, which does not so much prescribe an iconography as continuously infer one from us.

Wilson’s sculptures are animated by a related instability. In one of them, Chinese scholar’s rocks collide with the visual requisites of the hunting trophy, producing an unlikely hybrid that promises the trappings of status while refusing any stable symbolic reading. Another sculpture transforms a palm tree into an oddly familiar yet ostentatious domestic object. Natural specimen, cultural artefact, ornament, trophy, status symbol: categories accumulate without ever settling into a single position. For Wilson, this ambiguity also has a political dimension: “Our desire to hold a single position is so tempting, but ultimately impossible without damage.”

This proposition lies at the heart of The Unclean Slate. The title rejects one of modernity’s most persistent fantasies: the possibility of beginning again, uncontaminated by what came before. Art history itself abounds in claims of caesurae, with the new repeatedly announcing itself through the rejection of the old. Wilson serves up something considerably messier. Images never begin from zero. They arrive already inhabited – by other images, conventions, institutions, the history of looking, and increasingly by the technological systems through which they circulate.