The title of Didier William’s impressive solo exhibition here, “Nou Kite All Sa Dèyè“, is Kreyòl, or Haitian Creole, for “We left it all behind” – appropriate, as the artist’s family moved to North Miami from Haiti in the late 1980s. While William’s genealogy and the exhibition names evoke specific geographical locations, the “where” and “when” examined in the thirty-nine works on display (mixed-media paintings on wood panels, prints, artist’s books and a sculpture) are never direct.
Mosaic Pool, Miami, 2021, is one example: the titular basin, surrounded by orange-brown tiles and brightly colored flora, is not an atypical scene for South Florida. However, the lush foliage could also be reminiscent of the Caribbean landscape William’s family left behind. From afar, the dynamic, elaborately patterned shapes emerging from the pool read like frolicking, miasmic bodies wearing swimsuits in bright greens, oranges, and blues. Indeed, the work was inspired by the artist’s recent stay in one of Miami’s luxury buildings, where he and his brothers had rented a room. Yet a text by William hanging next to the image explains that he would not have had access to this kind of lavishness as a youngster who grew up in an immigrant working family.
Coming closer to the image, it is clear that the figures are composed of countless disembodied eyes which the artist has meticulously and obsessively inscribed into the wooden surface of the piece – sculpture plays a major role in much of the William’s work. The large number of irregular and wavy black outlines delimiting the eyes evoke a powerfully unsettling feeling. Additionally, the subjects’ clothing is rendered above the eyes in colored hatching, intensifying the overall dizzying effect of the painting. William began incorporating the motif shortly after the 2012 murder of teenager Trayvon Martin, who lived in Sanford, Florida. Perhaps the eyes are meant to protect the bodies from an omnipresent and oppressive white gaze, offering a form of protection that watches over the watcher.
Also included here is a group of paintings that transform into more historical works of art. A powerful example is My Aunt Toya (My Aunty Toya), 2017, which riffs on the 1793 canvas by Jacques-Louis David Death of Marat. In William’s work, the subject of David’s work is replaced by a woman emerging from a bathtub. The vibratory aspect of the image caused by the excess of eyes suggests that the enigmatic figure depicted is vividly alive. Her head is incredibly tilted and parallel to her outstretched arm, which is holding a machete. Used in the cultivation of sugar cane, the massive blade is also a powerful signifier of Haiti’s eventual disentanglement from French colonial rule (under France, the nation was known as Saint-Dom-ingue). William’s intention is to subversively supplant the revolutionary figure of Marat with a figure that references the world’s only successful slave revolt.
A dimly lit gallery in the exhibition is covered in custom-made textured wallpaper printed with countless eyes. However, their sclera are a slightly different shade of black than their outlines, making them largely invisible. Again, this type of camouflage further emphasizes the artist’s interest in anti-legibility, or a kind of slippery opacity.
It should be noted that William is queer, but his art is closer in spirit to using the word as a verb rather than a noun. The artist’s works destabilize, rather than reinforce, a singular identity and operate in the interstices between race, sexuality and nationality as objects of fantastical narrative and documents of black life.
