Sue Williams at 303

Art in America, Feb, 1999 by Maura Reilly

Early in the 1990s, Sue Williams made a stylistic about-face. She left behind her cartoony, roughly executed, graphic depictions of brutalities against women which were captioned with text-bubbles in favor of increasingly abstract compositions built of colorful, frenetic lines. Williams continued to explore the theme of sexual abuse, but the increased abstraction and gestural vigor of these wordless, pictorial ciphers resulted in a new expressive opacity and even lyricism. This drastic shift in style came as a great surprise to many, especially those who had commended her direct interventionary tactics. At first glance, it appeared that Williams had lost her feminist fervor.

Her latest paintings represent another step in this "politically indirect" esthetic. Large, less congested, brightly colored and filled with droopy and grabby things, these are not works with overt ideological content but paintings about painting, about gesture, calligraphy and drawing. Indeed, it would appear that the artist's primary concern here is an esthetic one: the conflation of drawing and painting.

While abstraction and near-nonobjectivity reign supreme, viewers seeking the explicit sexual parts which inhabited Williams's earlier canvases will find them. In Accident Pants (1998), soles of shoes, drooping breasts and limp penises morph into cow udders, while anuses eject bright, calligraphic explosions. Likewise, in Frolicking Green Shoes (1998), caricatural penises soar through the composition with flapping testicles for wings. Appendages and organs still abound in these canvases, but the actions portrayed are so distorted, the forms so fragmentary, that any narrative interpretation is denied. The viewer's mind completes these morphological transformations; Williams merely suggests them.

Perhaps Williams's recourse to abstraction is a response to criticism that her earlier work was too obvious or too crude. The question to ask is whether her new esthetic is so obscure as to have lost its political thrust. But, one could argue, after the aggression of her best-known work, almost anything would seem tame and perversely poetic.