Justin Williams

COMA is pleased to present Drowning Men Are Supposed To, a solo presentation of new work by Justin Williams, on view 26 November, 2021 – 13 January, 2022 in the gallery. This is the artist’s second solo show with COMA.

Using an amalgam of people, of cultures and of points in time, Justin Williams has developed a language embedded in acts of figurative painting that positions figures, both real and imagined, in historical or cultural moments that feel so akin to one another the differences and abnormalities attempt to dissipate.

This is storytelling at its finest, at its loosest and most malleable. The characters that populate the canvas cause the viewer to naturally make assumptions about the time-period, the location, the occupations, and the lives of the inhabitants. By inserting nods to familial and personal histories as well as transplanting figures from a range of source material the accuracy of these assumptions skews.

These intimate vignettes create an initial sense of welcome but in doing so often identify that either a key figure is missing or that there is room for one more. It is at this point that Williams asks the viewer to share in a sense of anxiety through connection. The synthesis of cultural identifiers allows one to experience a forced nostalgia – something Williams has been working with since beginning to sand the face of his canvases – a role to play in a personal history one was never truly a part of.

Physically the paintings work to make this atmosphere clear. Riders on horses seem immobile and completely still whilst the bodies of the animals stretch and elongate as if aching to move. Like a merry-go-round the artist is able to set opposing figures or painted components in a state of stasis, almost like a collage of sorts, gradually moving together as if dependant on the existence of one another.

Looking at these artworks one can feel that they are privy to communities only ever meant to be passed through, groupings of people that may never have met, drawn from recent histories we have lived, we have read about, or we have been told.