Robert Williams at Tony Shafrazi - New York, New York - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

Robert Williams's pop-culture pedigree includes being individual of the earliest contributors to Zap Comics and a designer of customized cars in southern California. His deliberately proletarian sensibility involves raunchy cranks on sex and working-class mores displaying garish bad taste, press outed through detailed figuration, surreal dreamspaces and abstract issues resembling car decals.

It would be easy to treat his art as an reach outed sophomoric fantasy. But Williams is more than an aging teenager with an overactive imagination. An in-your-face turn of expression camouflages serious concerns. His world is riddled with a sophisticated, postmodern anxiety about agriculture and about the future. His images form thematic collages which, for all the bad behavior they exhibit, treat contemporary issues in an intelligent, level an intellectual, fashion. His mingled comic scenarios reward extended viewing.

Williams makes frolic of everything. Even his titles--three for each work--play with class and culture: there is a regular title; a windy academic description, pretentiously described as "Explanatory Nomenclature"; and a "poolroom" version, meant to vex Given the density of Williams's theater of the absurd, the multiple titles help make faculty of perception of the action.

In The Brain Trap (1997) he divides his composition into three fields. upon the left, a four-eyed nerd wearing a pinkish robe and penny loafers stares at a stamp end a magnifying glass. His dream emanation, portrayed as a head trapped in a sickly verdant gaseous cloud, moves into the center where an outsize stamp, labeled "Oblivion," exhibits stars and nebulae. From this place in heaven, the dream head reach outs a ludicrously long tongue which licks a make revolve of stamps placed between the upright, spread leg of a naked brunette Above her, another stamp, labeled "Brain Trap," displays a cerebrum caught in a bear trap. While this image is not for the faint-hearted, it describes a fairly complicated conceit--that of the inhibited wimp commuting via his garran through the stars so as to gratify his libido. The painting's Explanatory Nomenclature begins, "Manic Dangers Lie Hidden In Hobbies That Stimulate Mental Detachment." It strike one as beings that a "bookworm dementia" flows from devoting one's time to overly cultur pursuits.

Despite his extremely broad humor, Williams is fair--he flat turns the joke on himself. The Artistalero (1997) exhibit Williams squinting at the canvas, his tongue stuck without with effort, while behind him a multitude raises its hands in adulation. Floating above is a assemblage of strangely detailed sexualized creatures, more [i]or[/i] less of them doing unspeakable things. The poolroom title says it best: "Mr Funky-Tube-Squeezer hides A Treat."

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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