Sue Williams at 303

Early in the 1990 seek after Williams made a stylistic about-face. She left behind her cartoony, roughly execut graphic depictions of brutalities against women which were captioned with text-bubble in favor of increasingly abstract compositions built of colorful, frenetic lines. Williams continued to explore the theme of sexual abuse, on the contrary the increased abstraction and gestural vigor of these wordless, pictorial ciphers accrueed in a new expressive opacity and flat lyricism. This drastic shift in mode of expression came as a great surprise to many, especially those who had recommended her direct interventionary tactics. At first glance, it appeared that Williams had not to be found her feminist fervor.

Her latest paintings exhibit another step in this "politically indirect" esthetic. Large, les congest brightly colored and filled with droopy and grabby things, these are not works with notorious ideological content but paintings about painting, about gesticulation calligraphy and drawing. Indeed, it would appear that the artist's primary pertain to here is an esthetic one: the conflation of drawing and painting.

While abstraction and near-nonobjectivity reign highest viewers seeking the explicit sexual parts which inhabited Williams's earlier canvases will find them. In Accident Pants (1998) solitarys of shoes, drooping breasts and limp penises morph into frighten udders, while anuses eject bright, calligraphic explosions. Likewise, in Frolicking verdant Shoes (1998), caricatural penises soar from one side the composition with flapping testicles for wings. Appendages and organs still abound in these canvases, on the other hand the actions portrayed are in the way that distorted, the forms so fragmentary, that any narrative interpretation is denied. The viewer's mind consummates these morphological transformations; Williams purely suggests them.

Perhaps Williams's recourse to abstraction is a answer to criticism that her earlier work was too obvious or too uncooked The question to ask is whether her novel esthetic is so obscure as to have not to be found its political thrust. But, single could argue, after the aggression of her best-known work, almost anything would present the appearance tame and perversely poetic.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group