The Horse Hospital , Bloomsbury London is presenting an exhibition of new works by Nicholas Williams. The exhibition will coincide with Frieze week forming part of the Horse Hospital’s year-long programme to mark its 30th year as a vital and progressive venue for art and performance.
The show represents Williams’ first London solo exhibition in over thirty years. It brings together a group of paintings and accompanying sculptures – the physical attributes that inhabit a number of the paintings. The works are a response to a climate of hidden agendas, an opacity of power and the rise of conspiratorial dialogues.
Exhibition runs from Friday 13th October – 11th November.
Open Tuesday – Saturday 12-6pm
The Horse Hospital
Colonnade, Bloomsbury
London WC1N 1JD
https://www.thehorsehospital.com/events/coterie
Catalogue essay –
Ben Street >> September 2023
Nicolas Williams: Coterie
When the studio door closes, what’s left in there? Finished or half-finished things, materials, objects, the stuff of a painter’s life. Things caught in the process of becoming something else. “For me, chaos breeds imagery” – that’s Francis Bacon, explaining the famous detritus littering the floors and walls of his Kensington workplace. Cast your eyes over the reconstituted Bacon studio in Dublin and it’s true, imagery does present itself: a smear on a torn photograph easily suggests a potential new painting, just as it must have done for him. So the studio is a place where things come to life. Not just a place of work, then, but a kind of petri dish, an image-generating machine. “You leave the studio and, “Gee, I left a lot of people in there”” – that’s Philip Guston, going one step further. Not just potential images but actual lifeforms. People. Painting’s special ability to do this – to make animate the dead matter of the mud and fabric it’s actually built from – makes it a kind of uncanny practice. Nicholas Williams makes paintings that dramatize that ability. To make and show something that has the appearance of actual life. Living things.
Actual life is present in the making of these paintings. You feel that. That’s to say that Williams’ way of painting, his attention to surfaces of skin, hair, and painted plaster, is also a way of insisting that what you’re seeing actually took place. That whatever is taking place is an event to which the painted canvas bears witness. The precision of Williams’ rendering, especially when two different kinds of surface meet (the PVC jacket and rose petals in Coterie is one of many moments like this), seems to be a way of saying this really happened. The testimony his patient naturalism brings into view is one embedded in a startling encounter with the visual world. It’s as though the paintings themselves can’t believe what it is they’re seeing. This mystery of the visible world is a preoccupation of these paintings. Look, for example, at the title of his series of praying or meditating figures: What Is It You Pray For? In each one, Williams’ forensic analysis of the folds of his sitters’ skin, the precise point of liquid in their eyes, feels like a performance of that question. What’s going on inside that head? It’s a question all his paintings ask. What’s behind this? What’s inside?
Working in a darkened studio, as Williams does, allows these questions to come to the fore. Artificial light picks his models out of the shadows. That light, our only guide into the dark world of the painted scenes, shows and hides at the same time. (Masks, made and painted by the artist and shown in this exhibition alongside the paintings for the first time, make this point too). It’s in this sense that Williams’ paintings respond to the history of their medium. In paintings by Caravaggio, the manipulation of light through blocked windows and strategically positioned lamps and candles was a literal activity that bore much larger implications for what went on in the paintings themselves. Directional light, like the misdirection of a close-up magician, says look here, don’t look there. Our experience of seeing a Caravaggio painting is like being ushered through space by an invisible authority. This audience manipulation is the voice of real power, whether embodied in church or state. What is not shown matters too. It is this, I think, that accounts for Williams’ use of related techniques and effects in his paintings. In Coterie, four masked protagonists gather around a table; the title invites a sense of collusion, even conspiracy. Two different light sources pull our attention across an array of sharply delineated surfaces. It’s not simply that the minimal lighting effects call to mind the atmospheric lighting of a horror film, bringing up nefarious or terrifying associations. I’s that the light itself pushes us around just as this clan of goons seems ready to do. The painting’s intensity comes from a tension between clarity and obscurity. We take in a detailed and comprehensible tableau that nevertheless keeps on not showing us everything. Look here. Don’t look here.
The politics of Williams’ work are about showing and hiding, concealment and revelation, all qualities that the effect of light and shadow serve to dramatize. Williams’ contemporary version of the baroque is one in which images embody the broader authority of the political world in which they sit. It’s in this sense that his paintings become a kind of funhouse mirror to the politics of his time, one in which the visual language of revelation is always subject to manipulation, concealment and forgery. Painting’s ancient ability to fool the eye – what’s often called trompe l’oeil, that quality of a painted image that tricks the viewer into credulity – is transposed here to a political context in which the veracity of images is more subject to doubt than ever before. Why explore these ideas in painting, though? The answer is, I think, in the way Williams’ paintings continually point us back to their own physicality. Get close to the surfaces of his work and the bobbled weave of the canvas becomes increasingly apparent. We’re reminded that these are objects, not images; things made slowly, long periods of looking and sitting condensed and compressed into the warp and weft. What this physicality means is that these painted images reflect – slowly, materially – on the fast and immaterial images of which our political lives are so often constituted. Each painting is a way of thinking about how images work. And it’s in their material reality, their thereness, that they come to life, inviting questions we might make not only to paintings but to the authorities that push and pull our lives in unwanted directions too: what are you? What’s behind you? Is there light in those eyes, or is it only the glint on a painted mask?
