Michael Williams
Paintings, Nov 1 – Dec 15, 2013

This time, Michael Williams presents a dozen new paintings, crafted largely with the help of digital technology. The "paintings" are drawn on a computer, printed on canvas, then stretched, and often painted some more at the end. The images are freely associated constructions often involving landscape plus figuration plus wit or whim. Mr. Williams has a great gift for making images that never should have been executed or even imagined. The works are less surreal and more precisely non-real or simply wrong. There is power in harnessing the wrong in such definitive and thorough proportions.

The paintings are large, seven footers, and the colours are rich like the ones from a billboard on the side of a steakhouse. Birthed in a studio that rivals Santa's other workshop, Mr. Williams grows paintings one at a time, each one out-performing the last. He is a demanding inventor and the paintings are full production affairs. There is an uncommon balance here of sophisticated formal painting codes and subject matter that comes back to us later while we wipe the condensation from the bathroom mirror. Anyone can make a far-out painting, but Williams ties the knots. It's hard to make a painting funny; Mr. Williams does it more often than any artist I can think of. If you prefer aloof art, don't come to this show.

Here are some of the painting's titles:

Honk If You Don't Exist

We'd Better Get My Prius

I Wish That Was My Cousin's Name

Hundreds Of Dollars Of Meditation Equipment

Mr. Williams unhinges us from the art that we trusted. Habits grown from returning expectations are dissolved. At one of Mike's openings we might find the crotch of our pants staining blue or our ears slipping down our necks. It's hard to know how to dress for these things. Our hair-do's don't and our small talk deflates and scurries out the door, up the street, and into the sewer under the New Museum. Not satisfied with just passing the ball and joining up with his fellow artists, Williams prefers to throw the whole thing up the chimney. These are alien paintings, where the rules of war have been discarded.

Michael Williams has upcoming exhibitions in 2014 at Johann Koenig in Berlin and Michael Werner in London.

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