Barry Whistler Gallery is pleased to present Danny Williams solo exhibition Re-Trouvailles, recent paintings on paper. This is the first look at Williams’s new color work in almost a decade.

His previous solo exhibition was comprised of small black and white charcoal and ink works on paper. Most of these works were done when the artist spent ten years outside of Paris, France. The new show includes over 30 works on paper that bring unexpected color and vibrancy influenced by poetry, writing, music, and the artist’s much earlier work. The title of the show Re-Trouvailles (a French word) refers to the emotion of recovering something believed altogether lost. Williams traveled to India in 1978 on a Fulbright-Hayes Grant and you can see much of what he observed there in this current show.

A catalog of the exhibition is forthcoming and will include an essay by the esteemed writer David Searcy... An excerpt included below Searcy’s “The Danny Williams Tarot”:

These masks, masked faces, tigers, birds, kings, mermaids, human torsos, wings (detached, angelic wings) are charms, Milagros, gaming pieces. Language, maybe – at some pictographic, pre-syntactical stage whose parts are loose and recommend themselves to prophecy. Just take your chances, step right up and gather a few and toss them on the glittery board of life. And, to be sure, most of these brilliantly colored acrylic and gouache on heavy paper images do obey a certain tarot deck or game board uniformity. The flat, schematic quality of course. But size as well – which, at about 22 x 30 inches, makes them that much easier to shuffle. Close your eyes and pick on out. You might get lucky.

Danny Williams is a Texas native (Born in Waco, 1950). Danny has worked in a variety of media including printmaking, as well as sculpture, drawing, and painting. His work has been exhibited extensively nationally and has been shown internationally. His works can be found in the permanent collection of many museums and private and corporate collections including the Dallas Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Danny received his BA in anthropology from SMU and his MA in painting from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa.