Text by David Humphrey on the occasion of the exhibition, Lux Fecit de Alun Williams
at the Villa Tamaris Centre d’Art, La Seyne-sur-Mer, Toulon Métropole, 2019-20

Lest we Forget

What is it to have a life? It’s overwhelming to imagine the pile-up of lives that have preceded ours, some documented, even celebrated, but mostly not. Alun Williams seems to say “pick one, and let it intersect with yours for a moment”. It could turn out that unexpected epiphanies will result from attempting to imagine the life of a single expired other, or we might come to understand ourselves as an assemblage of unacknowledged others and their disappearing effects. Williams makes paintings that are indirect and perversely elaborated portraits of people in the past who have come to his attention for one reason or another. He is an itinerant historian using the expanded research tools of postmodernism to stimulate his painterly hybridizations. Williams’ paintings conjure unconsidered possibilities and illuminate obscure areas of the collective imagination.

Alun Williams selects and carries out research into a person he’s decided will be worth his time. The project sends him into the fi eld in quest of knowledge about his chosen subject and to find an accidental paint spill that will serve in his imagery as a surrogate for the person being researched. The selection criteria are both random and rigorous as the location and morphology of the spill need to simultaneously satisfy many conditions. Once chosen, the splat is rendered over and over in drawings and paintings that provide a variety of locations and social encounters. Williams renders these encounters with a casually swift muscularity that suggests that the staged encounters are fleeting and the artist is already moving on to the next subject. Paint itself sometimes spreads across the canvas, not quite meeting the edge, as a disciplined squarish cousin to the dripping splat depicted on the brushed surface. Williams’ repetitions and image selection perform something both arbitrary and magical. The images exercise the power of naming to change things in the world ; associations are built into matter and traces of the laboring body. Contingent history is saturated with idiosyncratic affect while the artist tells a story of the self as a liquid fiction.

Williams treats his locations, which range widely across time and space, as another protagonist. Suburban back yards, fancy gardens and villas, trailer parks and a variety of interiors provide space and amusing thematic context for his disguised historical personages. He stokes a charged sociability between creature and habitat. The relation between representation and memory, text and context is theatricalized. Postmodern heterogeneity is no longer a disruption ; Williams uses different picture languages and styles as if they were themselves actors in a fluid transhistorical drama.

In his most recent body of work, completed at the Villa Tamaris residency, Williams burrows down into the life of Michel Pacha, a late nineteenth century French sea captain and builder of lighthouses along the Ottoman coast. Williams uses the lighthouse as an avatar for Michel Pacha to tell the story of a life committed to the safe movement of boats and people across water. Michel Pacha used his new wealth to build a fancy chateau for his family and a resort community that includes the Villa Tamaris where Williams’ made these new paintings. Jules Verne returns to the scene and the women in Michel Pacha’s life make appearances in the guise of Orientalized figures from art history : Ingres, Matisse, Picasso.

But the lighthouse is the most frequent player. Long rolls of burlap are filled from end to end with a sequence of lighthouse paintings derived from famous and not so famous images. The tower, a guide and beacon, once warned of danger but has become, thanks to satellites and sophisticated telecommunications, a tourist attraction, subject of postcards and landscape paintings, selfi e backgrounds and amusement for passing cruise ships. The neutered towers have evolved into a symbol used by municipalities to brand their locations, aided by guidebooks to tell the story of a lost and picturesque past. Williams’ depictions range between accurate descriptions and moody symbolist suggestions. Sometimes specifi c artists are cited, like Paul Signac or J. M. W. Turner. The generic character of these images somehow liberates them as paintings. The work launches into a sea of floating signification moored loosely to Michel Pacha. Paint clogs the soft grid of the burlap’s surface as waves swallow boats and lights beam into the night sky. The lighthouse stands tall, there for all to see, reliable and enduring, resurrected and re-erected, the opposite of an accidental paint spill, yet, for Williams, the lighthouse is a capable, if not equivocal, memorial for whatever you like. Reassign its meaning, attach a rhino, throw in some angels ! The painted lighthouse stands above the turbulent waters of time and history like a raised middle finger, an erectly self-possessed figure exiled from function and free to roam.

The itineracy of maritime navigation is like the movement of the unmoored self, passing between roles, obligations and desires. The fixed idiomatic image provides unreliable bearings. But memory is tripped and quickened by the painting’s ritual/devotional mimesis and Williams’ unhinged lyrical history.

David Humphrey, Rome, 2019
New York artist and art critic