TIM WILLIAMS: 21st Century Sucks
Heron Arts
In 1971, the Kinks released “Twentieth Century Man,” a rollicking indictment of the contemporaneous
age of machinery
A mechanical nightmare
The wonderful world of technology
Napalm, hydrogen bombs, biological warfare
This is the twentieth century
…too much aggravation
It's the age of insanity
In 2026, many of us might find ourselves in rueful agreement with 21st Century Sucks, the bluntly humorous title of Tim Williams’ painting exhibition at Heron Arts. A rejection of the present along with nostalgia for a real or imagined past and dreams of utopian future is nothing new in art. Classical painters depicted a bygone Golden [i.e, pre-industrial] Age, blending pagan and Christian myths; the Futurist painters of a century ago, conversely, loathed the industrial backwardness and conservative culture of Italy at the time, adapting the revolutionary style of Cubism to promulgate an aggressive future regime free of deadening museums, moonlight and pasta: (Unfortunately for them, and for Italy, they fell victim to the malignant spell of fascism).
Art, however, comforts and heals, as well as occasionally critiquing the nightmare of history, to paraphrase Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus. Tim Williams’ semi-abstract mixed-media paintings on wood panel, employing the fractured planes of Cubism and the borrowed mass-media imagery of Pop, are engaging collage-puzzles of colliding, contradictory elements culled from the chaos of our ‘sucky’ times, organize and transformed. Williams embraces “…images shaped by excess, speed, contradiction, and collapse. Using collaged imagery from my own photographs, planes, trains, automobiles, and the debris of modern life, I build dense compositions that reflect a world already coming apart. Within that chaos, there are still moments of beauty.”
WIlliams’ image scavenging impulse is balanced by his compositional mastery, so that the cutout elements never seem random, but held in a gravitational dance, with centripetal and centrifugal forces perfectly balanced. Along with the artist’s ability to mix and match disparate and discordant elements is a compositional device that was discovered only a few years ago, the Einstein tile, a irregularly shaped polygon or polyhedron resembling a fractured hexagon that, rotated variously, covers a flat surface not only completely, interlocking, without gaps, but also without forming a predictable repeating pattern. Wikipedia defines it as “a single prototile that by itself forms an aperiodic set of prototiles; that is, a shape that can tessellate [cover with tiles] space but only in a nonperiodic way. Such a shape is called an einstein, a word play on ein Stein, German for "one stone”.
Devotees of M.C. Escher’s prints will remember his works employing tesselation patterns of ‘opposite elements, like, say birds and fish, and flat 2D shapes alternating with rounded 3D shapes, like the crocodlians in “Reptiles” (1943) that crawl out of a book illustration into the ‘real’ space of the artist’s desktop, and back into surface flatness, an infinite cycle of metamorphosis— the ancient tetrapod invasion of the land.
Williams’ heady mixture of illusionism (in his commercial imagery, deconstructed and recontextualized) and pure abstraction (from his predilection for bright colors and strong; graphic patterns) may suggest Pop and proto-pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Stuart Davis, and even at times, Fernand Léger, who enjoyed the brash modernity of postwar American culture. Williams’ wryly humorous titles —e.g., “Chaos has a way of finding you,” Quietly yearning for what you don’t have while dreading losing what you do,” “Short con, long odds,” “Objectively better, subjectively worse,” and Bendzamine” (a jokey version of the name of an oral anesthetic)—poke fun at artistic pretentiousness while the extraordinary craftsmanship of the paintings proves that the artist takes the game and the work seriously. While the large works deftly interweave their representative and abstract elements, the smaller paintings are more abstract and intimate, and because of their smaller scale—think of Paul Klee— and more subdued palettes, seem addressed to the solo viewer, presenting surfaces that seem solidly packed, but threaten to disintegrate, like ice floes: “structure, but never symmetry. Order, but never resolution…. something that keeps shifting, something that doesn’t resolve.” Don’t miss these playful small treasures amid the other riches of this large show: “All work and no plagiarism,” The gates of perception,” “Thinking of you,” “Fate, and the “Einstein Tiles” series with their archaeological layers of tile floors or walls, partially exposing art and artifacts as bright as if freshly created.
