Michael Williams has a great new show of paintings up at Canada in New York! From the press release:
Williams creates a wild funhouse atmosphere glowing with intensely felt self-realization. The acute craziness of Ivan Albright, the ecstatic urbane visions of Florine Stettheimer, and the manically tender paint handling of Jess all collide in some of most unique paintings to hit New York in a long time. Williams has created a determined and highly idiosyncratic surrealism that feels genuine and individual.
Working almost entirely with a small brush, Mr. Williams manages to create texture that takes on an alive quality, similar to a burrowing parasite living under the skin or cream cheese frosting on a carrot cake. Whatever it is, the texture begins to overtake the potentially allegorical or symbolic meanings of the paintings, and launches them into a place all there own. An incredible and sickly world of human excess, the excess of the human mind when it has too much time on its hands.
Williams is a cheerful sort of surrealist, a New England surrealist. With an aptitude for portraiture (even when it is a portrait of a lamb) and a keen attention for detail, his paintings remind of another New England artist, Norman Rockwell. To Williams, the person best qualified to interpret one of his paintings would be his thirteen-year old cousin. Earnest, searching and free, that is the type of person who would feel a strong connection to a world where there are no hierarchies, where art, in the classic sense, is the only thing worth having.