"The most important thing about the work is that it is destroyed," says Glasgow-based artist Richard Wright about his gouache wall paintings, improvised on site and covered over at the end of each exhibition. His mostly abstract works, which often occupy very little of the given wall space, are representational in an unexpected sense: Rather than depicting a scene or object found elsewhere or pulled from his imagination, Wright's works "represent" the frequently idiosyncratic character of the site (a room's proportions or its décor) and the contingencies of the work's creation (the exhibition context or the artist's mood). Wright achieves maximum effect through frequently minimal interventions by combining his intuitive sense of color, form, and placement with a deep knowledge of the histories of art, architecture, and ornamentation. He oscillates primarily between marks that allude to familiar Gothic, Rococo, and modernist forms, frequently fusing them with the graphic hallmarks of subcultures. Reading between the lines (sometimes literally), viewers discover motifs reminiscent of tattoo design or biker-jacket decoration, scientific symbols, religious iconography, and ornamental patterning. Wright deliberately chooses "available" forms—ones he feels are divested of cultural content by virtue of their familiarity—and, with precision and a concentration bordering on what he calls the "ecstatic," imbues them with a new (and temporary) agency.

Wright maintains that architecture is subjective—an accumulation of encounters and observations rather than something that can be mapped out analytically with floor plans and elevations—and his paintings become a commemoration (in one critic's words) of his pas de deux with the exhibition space. For a gallery visitor, the surprise encounter with an out-of-the-way work, the significant optical transformations a painting undergoes from different points of view, and the attendant awareness of one's movement through space all foreground the negotiation inherent in viewing works of art. Context is inextricably linked to the artwork and the space between paintings becomes as important as the works themselves. (Perhaps an echo of some Minimalists' preoccupation with phenomenology can be found here.) The viewer's memory also performs a commemorative operation when considering the best of Wright's works, as she remembers not just the graphic punch of each painting but also the details of her engagement with them.

Situating Wright's practice can be difficult, as his art frequently takes contentious positions and registers numerous tensions. It attempts to slip free of the art market's grasp by remaining resolutely impermanent, making its destruction a precondition of its creation. It sits uneasily outside any genealogies of wall painting, which one critic divided into "mural" (Sol LeWitt, Simon Patterson, etc.) and "wallpaper" (Robert Barry, Michael Craig-Martin, etc.) camps. It can be difficult to reconcile the laboriousness of Wright's process with the ephemerality of the final product. Yet the work's thought-provoking ambiguities do not mask the pleasure of beholding one of Wright's paintings, both in discovering how it alters your relationship to a space and in knowing that the transformation is evanescent, a product of the very moment of the encounter.