ELEGY

Mixed Media

2m x 2m

2023

‘Paradise Lost is the debut solo exhibition from painter Brett Williams. With this body of work, Williams utilizes scale, tone, and texture to create experiential paintings channeling what the artist refers to as ‘emotional landscapes.’ These works speak to the complex relationship between our understanding of the world around us and our often-tenuous grasp of the interior worlds within us.

Williams intentionally works on expansive canvases, painting with pronounced texture to immerse the viewer in the scenes. As a result of their size and physical presence, one is seldom able to take in the entire scene at once. Not only that, but the depicted scenes shift dramatically and continuously depending on the viewer’s position, where the light catches their rich surfaces, in which subtle hues emerge. The paintings oscillate between representation and abstraction. Williams encourages the viewer to become imaginatively lost within the works, to follow the trajectory of the memories that the details and textures recall.

Thematically, the works grapple with entropy and hubris: the inevitable pull towards death and disorder in all things, and the misguided, arrogant belief that one can somehow be immune to it. Drawing his title from John Milton’s 17th-century epic poem - which allegorically looked at the Fall of Man and the possibility of humanity’s redemption by God - Williams instead takes these themes in a secular direction. In a sense, the works channel what the notion of the sublime meant for the Romanticists: humanity being dwarfed by nature. Williams translates this to contemporary - even post-apocalyptic - urban and arboreal landscapes.

‘Paradise’ for Williams represents glimpses of what could have been, moments of peace and happiness, an image of a ‘better world’ that feels so tangible and close, yet somehow perpetually out of reach. These moments of paradise are experienced fleetingly but are continuously lost due to selfishness, greed, denial, intolerance, and fear. War. Ecological devastation. The repeated missing of even the most rudimentary goals for averting climate change. Humanity as the architect of its own demise.

On a more personal level, the works serve as a means of processing the artist’s emotional landscapes, grappling with the recent death of close friends, heartbreak and reflection, and the battles of a deteriorating sense of self in the face of that. Glimpses of intimate paradises that all too easily erode or slip from our grasp. A Mourning.

Williams astutely imbues his scenes with both a towering sense of verticality and indefinite recession that points to an expansive world beyond the edges of the canvas. One can’t shake the impression that rather than being amputated slivers, these scenes retain their connection to something larger. There is a generative tension between elements coming into being and falling apart. Some areas formally serve as minimally painted sketches, others are richly worked and representational. Others still are purely tactile painterly abstractions or seemingly carved personal symbology. Combined, ‘Paradise Lost' offers the viewer a meditative, introspective journey into change, loss, and the things we hold dear.