Robin F. Williams "Undying" （Gallery Perrotin Tokyo）

Robin F. Williams "Undying"

Finished

Artists

Robin F. Williams

American artist Robin F. Williams will hold his first solo exhibition in Japan and with Gallery Perrotin Tokyo.

The exhibition comprises a selection of new paintings and drawings that explore the psychological dimensions of intimacy across multiple film genres. Some scenes capture moments of leering tenderness. Others, the afterglow of an unholy encounter. Each explores the dynamics of coercion, transgression, and submission that shape obsessive relationships while embracing the ambiguity of sexual agency therein.

Undying extends Williams’s enduring engagement with the representation of women and the construction of gender in portraiture, advertising, folklore, social media, and film. Her vivid imagery is as diverse as her source material. Known for highly stylized figures composed through layers of brushwork, marbling, airbrushing, sponging, and stenciling, Williams often employs an arsenal of tools more familiar to crafting than to easel painting. These techniques anchor the lush opticality of her images in haptic relatability, humbling the gravitas of oil painting while creating richly textured surfaces that reward careful looking.

Williams herself is a close observer. While creating Undying, she recalled looking for “the painting” in films, searching for shots where story and composition crystallized into an emotional punch. The resulting paintings, based on film stills, offer themselves up as a type of fan fiction that attenuates what is otherwise a fleeting erotic exchange. The Man Who Fell to Earth (2023), Persona (2023), Blue Velvet (2023), and Thirst (2023) offer a study in cinematic convention: all feature women on their backs under hulking partners, captured from the intrusive vantage point of an over-the-shoulder shot.

Williams locates the fine line between the erotic flirtation of colors versus the gray oblivion of their total imbrication; between the only girl and the “final girl”; and between the romance of an undying love versus the horror of the undead. Despite the ambiguity of the paintings, Williams wryly points out that their source films “are all tragedies, in the end.” The works in Undying walk the tightrope between self-determination and self-destruction, snaring both fictional subjects and real-time viewers in the frisson of a suspended moment where, as in good fan fiction, another ending is always possible.