What can you say about Robin F. Williams, a painter at the height of her powers, that doesn't just point to a beginning of a new art history? The Summer 2019 cover artist seems to evolve with each year, challenging herself with new techniques, new textures, new subject matter, and yet somehow has remained consistent in bending our collective identification as to what painting can be. Her newest solo show, Watch Yourself, on view this fall at Morán Morán, Mexico City, has an immediacy that is Williams' work, a sort of punch in the gut as to how an artist can manipulate materials in such a way, a magical blend of oil and acrylic that looks almost computer-generated in its technical precision but also a looseness that is akin to rule-breaking at every corner. —Evan Pricco
In Watch Yourself, the show’s title painting, an androgynous figure with smooth sculptural features reclines in swathes of electric greens, glowing yellows, and cobalt blues. Chromatic ripples in the physical presence of the paint mimic the smoke emitted from the cigarette held coolly, if not too long, between fingertips. This intense commingling between realism and surrealism, used here and throughout Williams’ representations of the Final Girl, recalls cinematic approaches to vision and concepts of film spectatorship, such as simulated embodiment, hapticity, synesthesia, and multi-sensoriality. As the only figure in the exhibition directly confronting the viewer, she poses the question: Who is watching whom? As Williams has said, “In horror, the viewer is very much on display.” – Lola Kramer
