Back in 2010, Los Angeles artist Michael Williams began a series of “puzzle paintings,” subjecting his previous imagery to a playful reshuffle. This led to the “noodle paintings” the following year, in which he layered images atop one another. A year later, the latter pieces led, in turn, to another group of compositions painted over inkjet prints.
For his first exhibition at Gladstone Gallery in New York, Williams remains on this self-deconstructing trajectory by using Photoshop to create large-scale mash-ups of abstraction and figuration to serve as backgrounds for his latest canvases. It’s an exchange between mediums and modes that he stages in a distinctly postmodern fashion, stressing both commonality and difference while employing an endless diversity of references.
The nine paintings here recall works from the ’80s, pieces that share a propensity for visual and conceptual clutter. Trying to sort out which marks come from which source in 2016’s New Field is challenging enough even before attempting to parse the significance of its self-disassembling architectural iconography. But take on the details one by one, and they become a more manageable, if no less teasing, proposition. Check out the inverted COEXIST bumper sticker in Vertical Composition (2017), for example. From a maddeningly self-satisfied original, Williams wrests a pictorial hook that is equally—if differently—confounding.