CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/27/2016

Sue Williams

"What does it mean to represent fear, and to account for the toxicity that accompanies unnaturally long-term experiences of it," Johanna Burton asks in JRP|Ringier's excellent new retrospective monograph. "Could it be that Williams' abstract-ish paintings… are able to put forward a kind of proof? Viewers encountering a canvas by Williams today—let's take "It's a Man's World" (2014)—will find a cacophony of color and line, bright slashes of near-neon pigment cutting briskly across a shallow background. There are some undeniable things here, but none of them stable: a grid that could be a keyboard or a toppling building; a towering figure that looks at once like a phoenix and a bulldozer. What is undeniable is the destructive force pictured, with everything in the process of being uprooted, lines of motion nearly Futurist in their depiction. If this is proof of the atmosphere all around us, it is, however, a kind of antidote, too, a suspension of the very forces that we deeply, and consistently, fear but do not see. It is a promise, maybe, that in making things visible, in figuring them this way, despite their unwieldy omnipresence, we stand a chance of producing counter-scenes too. And that is why, for all their terror, Williams' works—from the beginning, and now still—are impossibly pleasurable. They are proof that we are not only subjected to the world we live in, but subjects within it, too."