REVIEW BY EMILY BALLAINE
Green Apple Books on the Park (San Francisco)
There is a deep well of loneliness in the paintings of Margaux Williamson. A nearly empty table. A torso without a face. A figure asleep on a sofa. Even the colors themselves—a largely muted palate of browns and greys—fill the watcher with the sense that something is missing, a world of bright colors that exists at the corner of her vision.
It makes sense then (in a strange way) that I Could See Everything is a collection of Williamson’s paintings from an imaginary exhibit at the imaginary Road at the Top of the World Museum. These are paintings that should exist in the long nights that reach out and strangle the day, the sort of lonely, endless nights that could only exist at the top of the world. Williamson has created a world so separate from, well, what exactly? I won’t say reality because the reality in these pieces—the reality of seeing the world through books and newspapers and the internet—is the reality many of us often find ourselves living in. It is more that Williamson has created pieces that thrive within the limitations of that solitude. A close up on the dress of Scarlet Johansson becomes a study of the spiraling universe. A nearly empty kitchen table becomes a place where art is created. What is small is also infinite. What is ordinary is also beautiful. It is exactly because Williamson employs such a limited perspective in her pieces that they actually feel so expansive and magical, full of the power of that which is unseen in the dark nights at the top of the world.
I Could See Everything is published by Coach House Books and distributed by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution.
