Didier William

Wingate Studio is pleased to announce mennen m lakay, a new five-plate aquatint etching with sugarlift and spit bite, our first collaboration with Philadelphia-based, Haitian-born painter and printmaker Didier William. The project’s imperative title in Haitian Creole translates to “take me home,” alluding to the artist’s ongoing interest in home as an emotional state that extends beyond a single location and instead draws on one’s geographical, cultural, and historical roots and experience; put otherwise, home can be defined in peripatetic terms as an accumulation of memories over time and across space. It is with this in mind that William invites the viewer to explore this chromatically rich journey to an aesthetically charged intersection of multiple worlds.

Vertically oriented, the image incorporates three distinct textures. The painterly salmon and blue marks that dominate the aqueous upper register indicate arboreal forms that bleed into the wood-grained ground. At the same time, hundreds of painstakingly etched eyes decorate the undulating surface of a cavernous, subterranean space in the composition’s lowest register. As if mimicking these ocular forms, we witness the dynamic collaboration of three figures that form a human chain stretching between these two realms to form a third corporeal one. Dramatically lit and chromatically scintillating in sharp yellow, lush green, and fiery orange, these muscular and mannequin-like men collaborate, the lowest crouching to push up the second who is being pulled upward and above by a figure whose position echoes Salvidor Dalì’s Narcissus.  Whereas the loose, almost watery landscape at top echoes the proto-fauves gestures featured in the seascapes of Henri Matisse and André Derain conceived while working together in the French village of Collioure, the crisply demarcated pupils below remind us of the watchful eyes haunting the prints of Louise Bourgeois and the cellular forms frequently found in paintings by Gustav Klimt. Masterfully put in conversation with one another, these subtle art-historical references contribute to the powerful message delivered by the artist’s masterful coordination of techniques and motifs that elegantly defy traditional boundaries between painting and print. In that sense, William has created a beautifully orchestrated etching whose mark making is as precise and diverse as the rich passage that it articulates.

About the artist

Didier William is originally from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He earned an BFA in painting from The Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University School of Art. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Bronx Museum of Art, The Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, The Museum at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, The Carnegie Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and The Figge Museum Art Museum. He is represented by James Fuentes Gallery in New York, Altman Siegel Gallery in San Francisco and Galerie Peter Kilchmann in Zurich, Switzerland. William was an artist-in-residence at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation in Brooklyn, NY, a 2018 recipient of the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2020 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grants, a 2021 recipient of a Pew Fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, and a 2023 recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Grant. He has taught at several institutions including Yale School of Art, Vassar College, Columbia University, UPenn, and SUNY Purchase. He is currently Associate Professor of Expanded Print at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.