Didier William

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M+B is pleased to present Pulse, Didier William’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles and at the gallery. William draws on Haitian history, mythology and his personal experiences to explore the legacies of colonialism, resistance and the struggle for agency and identity. His powerful mixed media compositions lie halfway between figuration and abstraction. The epic, otherworldly bodies are composed of hundreds of tiny carved eyes that invite a haptic experience—an intimate, shared looking with the viewer that collapses physical and temporal planes.

What is the meaning and role of the body in representing identity? Portraits—and traditional renderings of the body at work, at play, in battle, in repose—are classic and conventionally accessible means of conveying the moods and states of humanity. The forms in Pulse, Didier William’s latest body of work, gesture towards a more boundless figuration. William’s massive figures—a kind of canonical and ontological correction—inhabit the otherwise unoccupied and cavernous realm between the heavens and the earth; in the spirit of the world’s first independent Black nation, these bodies, both familiar and fantastical, eschew exclusionary Enlightenment ideas about physical proportionality. They reflect, instead, the artist’s contemplation of Black futurity.

Pulse references the motif of hapticity, be it tender embrace or physical conflict. You can feel the pulse of someone’s carotid artery by gently placing two fingers on the hollow of their neck, just beside the windpipe. You can hear someone’s heartbeat/heart beat by putting your ear to their chest and listening to the organ’s steady percussion. Intimacy is often most readily and viscerally understood through touch, but, in the time of this novel coronavirus pandemic (during which William completed this body of work), he compels us to consider how we communicate intimacy and closeness as we are forced to distance—when a freeness of touch has been (temporarily?) stolen from us. His work is animated by a sensory shift that juxtaposes our separations with figures that melt into one another and the spaces surrounding them, the borders that individuate them (and us) falling away.

With these giant figures collapsing the space between sky and earth and sea, William is also troubling the forward momentum of linear time. There is an element of surrealism to his figurative abstractions: the bodies he illustrates, the bodies of Black people, are disrupting and destabilizing space and time. Even in their muscularity, their mountainous steadfastness and strength, there is a delicacy and dreaminess to these images, as though we are looking at figures that are inhabiting some unearthly and ethereal plane: like a parallel universe or an afterlife... the eyes are both ours and those of our ancestors; they are representative of a kind of an intimate, shared looking that collapses physical and temporal planes. We are looking at them and they are looking back at us, and we look at and alongside one another together, even if we cannot be physiåcally together.

William’s intervention is an invitation and a confrontation: it departs from the insistent and impossible attempt to assimilate Black people into the category of the human, and instead visualizes them/permits us to be as expansive as we want and need to be. If we cannot be “people," if forever precluded from humanity, then let us be giants—let us embrace the mythological and spiritual. Let our personhoods and cultural expressions, historiographies and relations, transcend the demarcations of what has been historically permitted; let us welcome the unfamiliar—the variety of possible outcomes—as we forge multidirectional futures and memories. Colors appear in space “as constellations [that] can be seen in any direction and at any speed.” Black, as the hue-less color that subsumes all others and perfectly absorbs light; Black, as presented by William, is the beautiful multiplicity of material and metaphysical realities and existences.

—Zoé Samudzi

Didier William (b. 1983, Port-au-prince Haiti) earned his BFA in painting from The Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University, School of Art. William’s work was the subject of a 2020 solo exhibition at the Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA. His work has also been exhibited at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Bronx Museum of Art, Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA; Museum at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Museum of the African Diaspora; San Francisco, CA; James Fuentes, and Anna Zorina Gallery, both in New York. His work has received critical recognition from The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, Harpers Magazine, New York Magazine, and Art In America. William was an artist in residence at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation in Brooklyn, NY and has taught at several institutions including Yale School of Art, Vassar College, Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania and SUNY Purchase. He is currently Assistant Professor of Expanded Print at Rutgers University. Pulse is the artist’s first solo in Los Angeles and with M+B. Didier William lives and works in Philadelphia.