William Monk works in a range of media including oils, watercolours, collages, and woodcut monotypes. His paintings are distinct for their radiant colours, curious detailing, and a simplified, almost childlike approach to composition. Information absorbed from news, magazines, and digital media may infiltrate Monk's images, but the artist steers his paintings away from the flatness of the digital through the dense, cumulative layering of paint. Often revisiting motifs such as roads, volcanoes, clouds, and weather, Monk's tendency to work in series reflects the fixation of the dream-state or hallucinatory mind.
Read MoreMonk's major 2013 solo exhibition Furthur Planetarium! at GRIMM London brought together a series of large-scale oil paintings alongside watercolours and woodcut works. Its title, including the deliberate misspelling, originated from the cult science-fiction author and counterculture personality Ken Kesey, who roadtripped across America in the 1960s in a bus named 'Furthur'.
Monk's exhibition similarly explored a road trip of the psychedelic, apocalyptic variety—with nuclear mushroom clouds, nebulae, desolate highways, dense forest, and isolated cityscapes recurring throughout. Furthur!! (2013) presents a point-of-view image looking down a highway, with a giant, lurid mushroom cloud dominating the horizon; while the titular series Furthur Planetarium! (2013) comprises three identical paintings of an electric blue atmospheric cover arranged on separate encircling walls.
Monk's application of paint alternates between swathes of luminescent colour and obsessively executed stippling and mark-making, grounding his works with a physicality despite their fantastical imagery. Robert-Jan Muller writes for Artforum: 'This preoccupation with minute detail—each speck of colour sitting in its own place—gives everything portrayed in Monk's paintings, whether a telephone pole or a highway's dotted yellow line, a life of its own.'
For his exhibition Seven Leagues to Pompeii (2017) at GRIMM New York, Monk presented a suite of volcano paintings in various sizes, orbiting around the central Son (2017)—a round canvas painted golden yellow. Monk's volcanoes range from the unthreatening twee—seen in Untitled (And the Seventh Brings Return Study) (2017), a small, simplified rendering of an erupting volcano in muted pink pastels—to darker iterations, which see an eruption depicted as little more than a burst of fire against a peaked silhouette, as in Flame or Alone in the Clouds All Blue (both 2016).
Though ambiguous in meaning, Monk's repeated use of the motif of the volcano delivers an apocalyptic subtext while allowing for considered, evocative combinations of pattern, colour, and flattening of forms. Writing for GRIMM, critic Jay Merrick notes that the paintings included in Seven Leagues to Pompeii '... often radiate a sizzling colour voltage, like tapestries about to burst into flame; others have the organic, hyper close-up quality of an electron-micrograph; some are like freeze-frames in a pulsing mescaline vision ... Monk's ideal creative condition is an only-just-conscious awareness of the way painted form, colour, texture, and specific figurations develop into compositions that seem to be knowable or decodable, but are essentially fugitive'.