Someone took a photograph of Neil William a few years ago in his native Utah, on what may have been his last visit. In the photograph, the artist is seen in a profile in the lower right corner, and spreading out beyond him are the vast canyons and mesas of the Valley of the Gods, as the site is called. This landscape is marked by massive weathering, and striated by bands of changing color. It’s not much as a photograph, technically, and would be impossible to reproduce. But it contains an expression, a geological extension, of his presence, a sense of turbulent beginning, tempered and order by time, finally realized as a great and enduring fact, meditative if not serene.

As a guide to understanding Neil Williams and his production as an artist is suggested by this image: it is an image of someone observing and incorporating what has been observed into the making of art. Williams called on himself and those around him to "pay attention", an expression codified by Carlos Castaneda in his writings on the fantastic Yaqui Indian sorcerer, Don Juan. For Williams, the fruit of this attentiveness is a way of understanding and being manifested in his conduct and in making of art. It is an Amerindian stance, supported by his formative years among the Navajo of the Southwestern United States, and it became a stance appropriate to his adaptation to the cultural climate and people of Brazil, where he hoped to conduct his mature years as a painter.

There is a videotape of Neil Williams at work on his painting, in the open air of a bungalow veranda on the Sao Paulo estate of the collector Kim Esteve. The certainty and attentiveness that Williams brought to his work is evident in this document, as he assembles his materials, painting and applying skins of dried acrylic to the surface of the paintings. There is something almost musical about his movements, something deliberate and calm, inflected by the deep green growth around him. The difference from the image of Williams in the canyons of Utah is one of both degree and of kind, but the natural substance remains the same: an artist profoundly touched and moved by this chosen environment.

Perhaps because so much of Williams’s work remained together, either because it was seldom exhibited during his period of self-imposed isolation during the seventies, or because, as in the Brazil paintings, the work preceded from a particular place and time, bracketed and made available through exhibitions, it may seem that there is an opportunity to read this material analytically. In fact, much of the work stored in his former studio in Long Island will defy such scrutiny for a time, until, if, and when, the paintings can be inventoried and conserved. The Brazil paintings are something else again. They are a kind of legacy, intact, and made available through the courtesy of Brazilian collectors who welcomed the artist’s virtuosity, through that of his representative Luisa Strina, and because of the generosity of his patrons.

In Art in America (January 1989) I wrote that Williams’s work corresponds to dominant concerns in the later history of Brazilian modernism. That correspondence is not so readily apparent in the Brazil paintings themselves, although they do incorporate areas of planar abstraction in shaped areas, or fuse a kind of tropicalism and expressive abstraction. The earlier hard-edge abstractions of his output in the 1960’s, included in the Lawrence Alloway exhibitions "The Shaped Canvas" (1964) and "Systemic Paintings" (1966) at the Guggenheim Museum, New York City, bear a certain formal relationship to the Concrete and Neoconcrete of Brazilian artistis, recalling the natural sources of the paintings of Volpi or the earlier work of Lygia Clark, and the continuing tradition of this formal concern in the work of certain contemporary Brazilian artists. I suggest that Williams recognized and welcomed this retroactive symbiosis, and although in a sense it derives from a recollection of his earlier work, the extensiveness of that involvement continued to inform Williams’s painting until the time of his death in April, 1988.

Williams had developed a technique of painting as collage in the 1970’s, applying dried skins of paint directly to the support, while retaining the structural device of the shaped canvas. He manufactured these skins independent of the paintings themselves, on sheets of glass. These passages and strokes of paint were peeled from the glass and incorporated into the overall composition of the painting through the adhesive of additional paint. Into this mix Williams introduced other elements from his immediate studio environment, most characteristically incorporating short-handled flexible polyurethane foam paint applicators. The Brazil paintings are a synthesis of the various painterly and structural techniques that he had developed throughout his career, with the intelligent hand of the master painter he had become.

Williams inevitably turned to these immediate sources, folding into his paintings what attracted his attention: a corona of nails, the scattered mosaic of plastic building blocks from a child’s game, a barely visible bulb from a string of Christmas lights, words applied directly to the surface of the paint with a discarded alphabet stencil. There are, as well, representations and abstractions, the leaves of a philodendron, the suggestion of a landscape or flower. In Jararaca, 1982, from Williams’s first extended visit to Brazil, the artist refers to the red-and-black spotted pit viper native to Brazil. Given his interest in the Portuguese of Brazil, he may also have ironically referred to a shrewish woman, as "jararaca" may signify colloquially. Certainly he refer to the serpentive forms that had become part of his vocabulary years before, an implicit invitation to reflect on the coherence and self-referential nature of his production. The two triangular lower panels of this complex work indicate Williams’s continuing involvement with the shaped canvas, but also derive from his observations of the back and white tiles of some Paulistan sidewalks fabricated during the 1950’s, which in turn are abstracted from a reductive outline of the State of Sao Paulo.

There are more historical, personal and broadly referential observations as well, in for example, the central panel of an untitled work of 1988 [collection Hector Babenco reproduced in AiA]. While in signature "zip" Barnett Newman bisects the overall composition, the panel to the left reads, in its overall Pollock-like gestures, "no" at the upper edge, and more centrally, "pain", followed by a scattering of the letter "t", a palimpsest and a kind of riddle. The same panel is marked by a handprint, presumably that of the artist, in red, which calls to mind the expression "redhanded", which is to say, "caught in the act". If we are intended to pay attention, then we must also accept the invitation to discover, to "find out". These elements, in the end, are part of the whole of the work, and are subsumed to the effect of the work as a whole.

There is no easy gloss to be made of Williams as an artist. The wit, intelligence, and logic of the oeuvre, and how he succeeds at the essay, do not necessarily demand access to the details of it’s history and iconography, and may be deepened by that understanding. In any case, the work reveals that what interested Williams most was the expression of emotional truth through formal accomplishment, as he indicated in a statement presented posthumously at the 1088 exhibition at Luisa Strina in Sao Paulo. There are reverberations of his Brazilian experience in a number of paintings executed after his first visit to Sao Paulo, but in Long Island. The most obvious response to the work is an impression of vibrancy, of joyous expression. But there is also a darkness, a brooding introspection, with a sureness of direction, a kind of inevitability.

Edward Leffingwell

Forward Neil Williams, Works from Brazil 1988