Kent Williams - In Animate: New Paintings

Symbols of death and playfulness abound in the new paintings by Kent Williams. In In Animate, the roles of human and inanimate objects are reversed. Day of the Dead skeletons and devils beckon and entice the human figures to break from their internal struggles that have frozen them, while in another painting, cute Japanese dolls rise to dominate and dwarf an adolescent girl. These paintings incorporate the contrasting allure of the playful with the more ominous edge these symbols represent. The figures, however stable their bodies may seem, belie an inner turbulence that takes place in the psychology of their faces, and the paintings are effused with this introspective intensity.

Along with these multi-layered narratives, Williams sets into a place a series of portraits and self-portraits, where the figures are observantly painted, a study in character with all the enigma and intelligence laid bare in the human form. As the art critic and historian, Edward Lucie-Smith states in the recently released monograph, Kent Williams, Amalgam: Paintings and Drawings, 1992-2007, "By representing his own likeness in this fashion Williams stresses the fact that painting is not just an act of physical making. Even more importantly it is an act of thinking."

This pamphlet of Kent Williams features images from his gallery between September 8 - October 6, 2007 located in the Merry Karnowsky Gallery in Los Angeles. This pamphlet is signed by the artist himself.

15 pages. English/Japanese/German text. Colored. Softcover.