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24/3/2005

William Smith

Littlejohn Contemporary, New York

Anthology

Littlejohn Contemporary is pleased to present a new show of recent works by William Smith.

The artist’s approach to painting is multifaceted. Drawing on many references, he creates densely layered images that combine painting, text, illustration and print. The consistent painted image is the landscape, and he uses it both as a reference point and a point of departure. His paintings are not of or about actual landscapes; the images are created in the artist’s studio from a study of specific references and the genre. The landscape image maintains a sense of composed artificiality that elicits a particular mood rather than evoking a particular place.

The paintings on book pages are a collection or anthology of landscape images that overlay a textual anthology of poetic quotations. Some of the pieces are painted directly on the original book page, creating an intimate image that is meant to be read like a manuscript page, and others are painted on large-scale digital prints of the original book pages, further distorting and abstracting the original book text. In both, the pages of a 19th century book become a filter or a frame for the landscape image. The paintings superficially reflect while simultaneously obscuring the text, its meaning and associations. The words that remain, often the subject titles or bits of poetry, allow the viewer to create an association between the image and text, while the hidden text keeps the viewer at a distance. In some pieces, the painted image is also “marred” with a cut that allows the text or an image underneath to show through. In the same way, the paintings that overlay printed etchings of old paintings both distort the landscape and the etching. All of these works comment on the shifting and elusive nature of perception and of time. In the paintings on text and print, as in all of Smith’s work, ideas of reflection, absorption and impenetrability are critical.

All of William Smith’s work involves a series of conceits expressing a duality of purpose and intention. Reflected within them are the tensions between the concrete and abstract, the ordered and the accidental, the temporal and the metaphysical. The paintings speak of the tension found in the natural landscape, the genre of landscape painting and the act of painting itself. William Smith would like to thank the Pew Fellowship in the Arts for a recent GAP grant.

Reception for the artist: Thursday, March 31, 5:30-7:30

LittleJohn Contemporary
41 East 57 Street, New York, NY 10022

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