Stephen Westfall: Better Angels at Serious Topics

“We are not enemies, but friends.”

Stephen Westfall’s upcoming solo exhibition, Better Angels, at Serious Topics gallery in Inglewood takes its name from Abraham Lincoln’s famous First Inaugural Address, the nation’s final desperate plea for unity before the American Civil War, when Lincoln famously insisted, “We are not enemies, but friends.” Opening November 7, 2026, just four days after the midterms, Westfall’s collection of nine new geometric paintings and a site-specific wall painting functions like a visual spell cast to hold a fracturing culture together through visual harmony, delicate symmetry, and deliberate counterweights. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, November 7, from 3:00 to 6:00 PM at Serious Topics Artist Project Space, located at 1207 N. La Brea Ave. (“Down the Driveway”), Inglewood, CA 90302. The opening afternoon kicks off early with a public conversation between Westfall and art critic and professor David Pagel at 1:00 PM.

Structurally, the canvases draw deep inspiration from psychiatrist R.D. Laing’s seminal 1970 book Knots, in which short, self-referential poetic dialogues loop back on themselves to map out complex interpersonal relationships. Westfall’s compositions operate with that exact recursive logic. Each canvas establishes a tight grid where triangles meet at their tips and every individual shape depends entirely on its neighbor to achieve balance. A diagonal closing one cell opens the next, while a figure color in one quadrant shifts to ground just inches away. In the title painting, Better Angels, alternating diamonds and hourglass crossings move the eye between expansive held forms and central pinches. In The Sirens, opposing directional triangles point toward and away from each other like voices speaking at cross purposes, yet the composition keeps the whole in quiet equilibrium.

That same web of dependencies is pared down to a single meeting place in Night Dreamer and Point Break, where four converging quadrants hold the entire frame in tension. In Carapace, the structure turns inward, trapping a vibrant yellow diamond within a larger diamond split between deep blue and red. Beyond the framed canvases, the site-specific wall painting River lets Westfall’s interlocking geometry run wild across the gallery wall. Tall triangles alternate like river rapids along the left edge, shifting sideways into stacked plum chevrons before spilling into broad, tilted bands of red, orange, and pink on the right. Where the framed paintings lock their tension into contained bounds, River lets the rhythm flow freely.

Westfall compares this painstaking visual logic to his childhood game of stepping on sidewalk cracks—a self-imposed ritual of physical palindromes where every step with the right foot demanded a counterbalancing step with the left to ward off harm. That same urgent insistence runs through the entire show, where carefully kept symmetry acts as a shield against chaos. The visual feeling is calm yet frantic, syncopated and symmetrical. While Westfall speaks of his connection to California painting traditions, the sharp primaries recall New York’s graphic edge, while his subtle tertiary browns, pinks, and greens catch the soft, distinct light of Southern California.

Just Go

• Exhibition: Stephen Westfall: Better Angels
• Dates: November 7 – December 19, 2026
• Artist Talk: Saturday, November 7 | 1:00 PM (Stephen Westfall in conversation with David Pagel)
• Opening Reception: Saturday, November 7 | 3:00 PM – 6:00 PM
• Information: SeriousTopics.com
• Location: Serious Topics Artist Project Space, 1207 N. La Brea Ave. (“Down the Driveway”), Inglewood, CA 90302