Juxtaposing elements of Surrealism and Abstraction with figurative forms, Michael Williams' practice presents an optical conundrum to the viewer by toying with perception. His psychedelically coloured paintings are a result of digital and painterly collage, built upon a combination of exacting processes and off-hand gestural strokes that encode meanings, often to contradict each other.
Read MoreWilliams' early work fell into a variety of categories that have since blossomed into further projects and mediums. He initially worked in a Surrealist representational style, predominantly in oil and airbrush on canvas, before beginning to incorporate digital inkjet print in 2011. Describing his own love for 'decoding things' as he paints, Williams' Surf n' Turf (2) (2009) depicts a lobster and a clam at a computer desk, amoeba-like patterns in rainbows of colour exploding out from the monitor. The viewer is forced to decode the visual swirls as the sea creatures presumably code them for us.
Williams' 'puzzle drawings' begin as doodles and sketches, which he then manipulates in Photoshop to remove a section in the shape of a jigsaw puzzle piece, continuing to draw in the space left behind. His solo exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh in 2017 featured one room of paintings and the other devoted to 40 drawings that were made in preparation to create the final product. Untitled Gourd (2016) displays an amalgamation of a computer keyboard, floor tiles, a galactic sky and his puzzle-piece-painted shapes to create a scene where the eye finds it difficult to land.
Williams 2020 exhibition Opening at Gladstone Gallery, New York featured works that moved away from his complicated visual style to focus on recognisable, unembellished imagery. The 11 monumentally sized canvases and five smaller collages were entirely produced through digital processes—combining collaged images lifted from commercial advertising and the artist's own virtual strokes—removing any evidence of his complex layering process. Painting (2020) depicts a figure standing in front of one of Williams' own paintings, exemplifying the self-referential and humorous thread that ties his works together.
