This is an exhibition of work that covers four years: it is the product of an artist engaged in a noholds- barred attack on the capacities of figurative, representative painting, looking at Landscape, Portrait and Still Life as genres and as ideas. Charles Williams is an artist well-versed in technique, through teaching, researching and publishing work on it, whose studio work extends and explores the ability of technique, of making, to represent content and subject matter. Some of these works are made in a morning, but they can sometimes take years to complete; their battered physical presence a testimony to the pure, single-minded search that each entails.

Artist’s Statement on Exhibition
This exhibition deals with Landscape, Portrait and Still life, as genres and ideas. The triptych ‘Bermondsey Park’, for example, started as two small drawings, made rapidly in a 12 by 9” sketchbook, observing a couple engaged in fitness training. The almost arbitrary lines to describe the edges of the grassy areas were developed in the painting into firm, abstract shapes, the fracture of the grass areas completely different from the pathways, as if collaged in flat shapes across the surface, recalling William Scott’s abstract/landscape/still life work, ironically replaying the grandeur of formalist, Modernist painting in a depiction of contemporary life. The painting ‘Something May Come Of It’ with its Alcazar-inspired background, refuses its clear identity as a portrait - the face as flat as a late Malevich painting of a Russian peasant, the pencil poised near the non-existent mouth in a characteristic Roman-Egyptian gesture, signifying contemplation, composition. There is a motif of Jules Verne’s head on the figure’s sweatshirt. We are looking at layered realizations of portraiture, the figure’s hair in a super-contemporary bun.

‘The Carthaginian Sandwich’ and ‘Resting Runner’ are both products of ‘Solipsistic Park’, a painting conceived as a generator of figurative ideas - starting at the top left and ending at the bottom right, ‘Solipsistic Park’ was made by automatic, intuitive invention - one figure followed another in a continuous surge of images, some of which were developed into single image paintings, with consequent extra focus - ‘Resting Runner’ becoming more reminiscent of Manet’s ‘Dead Toreador’, for example, ‘The Carthaginian Sandwich’ being pushed around the nearlysquare surface of the painting until a final harmony was struck.

The recent series of Still life paintings, with their clear memento mori connotations, are all made without models, and spring out of a reading of Norman Bryson’s ‘Looking At The Overlooked’. The space is deeply questionable, ambiguous and sometimes almost unreadable, the objects rendered in a variety of manners and methods, jumbled together seemingly without rhyme or reason. Whether there is a coherent meaning or idea being expressed is not clear; the snuffed-out candles and skulls might imply that but their proximity to other bits of rubbish and their very naivety suggests something else. These are not paintings of a domestic space as much as meditations on formalist painting, asking the questions ‘how do we paint?’ and ‘why do we paint?’

The Artist
Charles Williams’ work is characterised by a continual questioning of the nature and indeed the point of painting. In the past this has led to an abandonment of the medium in favour of three dimensions; his written work on technique could also be seen as a way of stepping out and looking in at an activity which is continually fascinating to him. This searching is evident in his refusal to ‘settle’; large, complex works are succeeded by small, simple ones, oil paintings by watercolour. Methodologies are examined, tested and proceeded from, often in the same painting. His unwillingness to use external reference material, photography, even his own sketches or notes in the studio reflects an early engagement with nineteen-seventies Abstract Formalist ideas about the integrity of the image and the painting as a record of an action or activity, and this seems to be a constant. On the other hand the focus of the work shifts across genres - still-life, figure composition, portrait, landscape, all the ‘traditional’ types of painting are examined; Williams is an artist unwilling to let anything go, to turn his back on any of the seemingly endless possibilities in painting. Simplicity, even naivety may seem to result, but closer examination will show that Art history informs the work as much as Art Now - it’s not uncommon to spot references from Imperial Rome, mid-century Expressionism and YBA in the same painting.

“In my work the surface of the painting is the arena on which all activity takes place. Figures sink into the ground, emerge re-formed, and dissolve again in a constant cycle. I am never sure of what the search is for; sometimes I am telling stories, sometimes caricaturing, imitating, mocking, sometimes simply balancing form against form, sometimes trying to unbalance them. The process is not satisfying in itself - I am not a machine - but it’s all the other stuff that crowds in that makes it exciting. Where do I put it? How?”