ROBIN F. WILLIAMS: UNDYNING
Perrotin is pleased to present the exhibitiong Undying by the artist Robin F. Williams. Undying extends Williams’s enduring engagement with the representation of women and the construction of gender in portraiture, advertising, folklore, social media, and film.
May 9 - June 22, 2024
Some scenes capture moments of leering tenderness. Others, the afterglow of an unholy encounter. Each explores the dynamics of coercion, transgression, and submission that shape obsessive relationships while embracing the ambiguity of sexual agency therein.
Her vivid imagery is as diverse as her source material. Known for highly stylized figures composed through layers of brushwork, marbling, airbrushing, sponging, and stenciling, Williams often employs an arsenal of tools more familiar to crafting than to easel painting.
Williams herself is a close observer. While creating Undying, she recalled looking for “the painting” in films, searching for shots where story and composition crystallized into an emotional punch. The resulting paintings, based on film stills, offer themselves up as a type of fan fiction that attenuates what is otherwise a fleeting erotic exchange.
The ambiguity of gendered pleasure and its mediation on film formed the central topic of early feminist theory. Indeed, the heyday of b-movie slashers in the 1970s was accompanied by a wave of canonical texts including Laura Mulvey’s treatise on visual pleasure and narrative cinema.1 The essay posited that film was a visual language developed by men for men, whose very structure preclude the possibility of female agency. Scholars since have insisted on greater complexity.
Grafting the laws of attraction onto the dogma of the color wheel, Williams plays at the edge of representation: complimentary colors provide maximum contrast when paired together but result in gray obliteration when fully combined. Photorealistic as they may appear, these paintings in fact hover at the edge of legibility. One brush stroke out of place, and the integrity of the whole would collapse.
Williams locates the fine line between the erotic flirtation of colors versus the gray oblivion of their total imbrication; between the only girl and the “final girl”; and between the romance of an undying love versus the horror of the undead. Despite the ambiguity of the paintings, Williams wryly points out that their source films “are all tragedies, in the end.”