Text by Felicity Lees

 ‘Like the species of the animal order, the mental stages within the human species, and the blind-spots in the individual, are stages at which hope petered out and whose petrifaction demonstrates  that all things that live are subject to constraint’
 –Adorno & Horkheimer; ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’

Upon the saddle of four horses the bearers of the apocalypse will arrive: The conquest of the world, the master of war, the bearer of famine and the bringer of death.  William’s art reflects on the relevance of this prediction in our current social and financial climate. William knuckles up to our extravagant consumptive behaviour through re-dimensioning human consumptive behaviour. The paintings recall the progression from the eye of a child to the eye of an adult; the spiritual regression from a world away from language into a world of pure objectification.

Constant greed and obsessive plasticity have started our undoing. Society is losing the ability to gain pleasure from that which it cannot hold in its hands. William confronts the root of this behaviour by searching for the point at which it begins. He tackles the point at which the desire to ‘have’ conquers the mind of the child. By finding this root we are then able to realise the truly ridiculous nature of this behaviour.

The cartoonish gaze from the eyes of the ‘horses’ order confrontation in an emotionless collision with the viewer, the static pleasure of the first encounter, in all of its momentary glory, visible from our eye to eye greeting with the pier-side apocalyptic carriers.

The paintings recall the progression from the eye of a child to the eye of an adult; the spiritual regression from a world away from language into a world of pure objectification. The introduction of gratification through material possessions becomes engrained into children from earlier and earlier age. The juxtaposition of the childish excitement and the anxiety and distrust we feel as an adult in a new place; the meeting place of that moment where you decide fight or flight; consume or be consumed. 

William works in a number of mediums from paint to film. His films are felt in the flesh they are that unsettled feeling in the pit of your stomach. Mechanical and pulsating soundtracks echo through the films leaving you a feeble, borderless excuse of a human. Anxiety and the provocative flesh are prominent themes that flow through a variety of his works.

‘Horses, horses, horses, horses
coming in all directions’ -Patti Smith

© William Dew 2009