Thomas Bills — NADA Miami, Booth C108

Baker—Hall is pleased to present a solo presentation of new works by Miami-based painter Thomas Bils at NADA Miami 2025, Booth C108. Rooted in personal memory yet unmistakably American, Bils’s paintings explore what he describes as a form of “Proustian Americana”—images that carry the emotional residue of everyday life, where the mundane becomes unexpectedly eloquent.

Raised in central Florida during the early years of the opioid crisis, Bils draws from the textures of his childhood: the absurdity, the danger, the boredom, the small rituals of suburban adolescence. His hyper-detailed paintings isolate gestures and objects that shaped that time—a mousetrap primed to snap, a crumpled “kick me” note, a casually holstered gun, yard-sale figurines, bathroom tile, tangled fingers, a social security card being pinched between fingertips. These scenes, at once hyper-specific and widely familiar, behave like memory triggers: visual madeleines that open onto the half-fictional America of youth, charged with both nostalgia and unease.

Bils often calls himself an unreliable narrator, and his paintings inhabit that slippery territory between truth and invention. Cropped like evidence yet staged like parafiction, the works feel simultaneously candid and constructed. His realism is crisp, heightened, uncomfortably intimate; but within this clarity lies a pervasive instability. In his hands, even the most ordinary object becomes a site of tension—humorous, ominous, ambivalent.

Life, as Proust reminds us, is one long accumulation of moments—fascinating, boring, and complex—and Bils’s paintings make the mundane startlingly clear, charged with a sensitivity that echoes Proust’s intuition for the emotional depth hidden inside ordinary experience.

This tension—between the banal and the existential—forms the emotional core of Bils’s practice. As he told Miami New Times, “Maybe I didn’t know it at the time because I was just a dumb kid, but my friends and I were kind of putting ourselves into a lot of danger. And some of those friends aren’t around anymore… And even though it’s all very deep and dark, it was still just really kind of boring.” His paintings hold that contradiction: the way danger can masquerade as normalcy, how tragedy can coexist with tedium, how memory flattens fear into something strangely quiet.

Within this paradox, Bils constructs a world where autobiographical fragments become universal reflections on vulnerability, perception, and the fragility of certainty. His paintings freeze liminal moments—too fleeting to notice at the time, too resonant to forget—and return them to us with a clarity that feels both forensic and tender. They invite viewers to reconsider how the smallest details of American life hold entire emotional histories.