Sue Williams (B. 1954)

Men and women of every age populate Sue Williams’ 1996 Young Ladies. There are a multitude of erotic scenes with some ruder than others: a man defecates in a woman’s mouth, another on top of a man holds a wheel in her hand, a woman rubs herself against a tree, whilst another smiles at an erect penis as a different woman leads a penis on a lead… These bodies are erogenous zones, orifices and sexual appendices. This painting is a maelstrom of delights, with characters that we perceive as being encumbered by their atrophied or hypertrophied members. These deformed bodies offer a range of erotic gestures, sexual positions and perverse practises. These characters are all at once, diabolical, voracious, debauched, orgiac, with inflamed bodies. There is here an energy full of impulses, a caustic humour with its erotic tribulations. This painting becomes a libidinal painting, exhibitionist with forbidden scenes, intimate and unspeakable: the subject is a sexuality that is not dictated by social conventions or taboos. Indecency, obscenity even are yet and again the soul of eroticism, of being in love and of desire”. As Williams has said’ “here the ladies are free to do whatever comes up, they can be obscene, they can be gross, they can morph. Maybe the painting tells a story of victimization and objectified. But here they can victimize if they wish.” From 1996, Williams started developing an interest in expressionist and surrealist abstraction. She elaborated a gestural type of painting, expressive with an interspersion of curved lines, of “cartoonish splashes”, joyful splashes, pictorial loops and rapid curves. In Fling and Fluss (2000), her expressivity has a strength of expansion which makes the whole composition very vivid. It is an explosion of pure colours because “in painting, colours only have their power and their eloquence only employed in their pure state when their brightness and their purity are not altered”. Colour reaches its full expression with the intensity of its execution. Nothing alters the freshness of these bold colours.

Text by Timothée Chaillou