Michael Williams
Uncle Big, Oct 15 – Nov 15, 2009

CANADA is pleased to announce “Uncle Big” a solo exhibition of new paintings by Michael Williams.

Puzzle pieces fracture and reconnect images of daily life, as if the artist is daydreaming strange situations into existence. A cat trotting across an electric ping–pong table, trees that writhe with the intensity of super natural beings, and a veiny paintbrush popping through a canvas. All of this and more belongs to Michael Williams’s far out vision.

In Surf n' Turf a lobster (already boiled) and his buddy the clam are
nervously surfing the internet with the computer screen coyly turned from our view... checking out recipes for butter sauce perhaps? Behind them wooden floor planks recede into a corner of the canvas. Williams gets more mileage out of wood grain than any other painter working today. The globulated surfaces are full of many moods and manners of paint handling, performing the time-honored tradition of reminding the viewer of the inherent falseness of the picture plane.

Michael Williams’s paintings are investigations into seeing and being seen. To Williams, spectating is an imaginative and experimental act, both inwardly and outwardly expressive. In Bacon n' Eggs a paintbrush observes another (curvier) paintbrush while a myriad of “shadows” are cast across a scene that's illuminated by multiple light sources. The image is both disconcerting and deeply relatable.

Williams’s paintings ask us to notice the little things, like the vents on a computer monitor and just how WEIRD they are. Seeing is lauded as something we do, something that happens to us and ultimately as something that has transformational power. His exploration of visuality, expressed through intensely tactile surfaces, tightly interlocking forms, and saturated colors make Williams’s paintings psychological in a playful sort of way.

At the same time Williams has a respect for the rule-based traditions of painting, or at least a curiosity about them. The paintings in Uncle Big operate as both utterly and completely finished and as lightly touched skeletons. Full of chromatic excess and wandering doodly patches, Williams exposes the tension between image and abstraction in these bountiful works.

Michael Williams was born in 1978 in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. He has had solo exhibitions at Galleri Christina Wilson, Copenhagen; The Green Gallery, Milwaukee; and Perugi ArteContemporanea, Padova, Italy. "Uncle Big" is Williams's second solo show with CANADA. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

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