NADA New York 2023

Dylan Williams’ oil paintings are concerned with the landscapes of South Wales, particularly Swansea, where he lives and works. Depicting his observations walking to and from his studio, the works reflect the conscious and unconscious processes of re-tracing through his surrounding environment. As light levels fall and forms emerge from the edges of vision, memory, imagination, metaphors and narratives begin to populate the mind’s eye and the pictures’ plane. Williams’ works are not distant landscapes, ‘over there’, but exist ‘here’, in the presence of the earth, his body, his daydreams; equally, he considers them to be renditions, resonations of stories and songs, informed by his native Afan Valley, the hills and the disused coal mines, and his family history there.

In ‘Over Your Head Forever’, a wet, gloomy atmosphere prevails over a Swansea landscape. A skeletal wintry tree reaches out between two buildings; their converging silhouettes echo Williams’ dual preoccupations with his built and natural surroundings. In this oil painting, he characteristically draws out layers of time and experience, and the past and future feel present; there is a sense that cycles of Welsh rain, imminent in the raindrops evocatively scattered across the canvas, do not wash away the past. In the last few months, Williams’ grief for his grandmother has darkened his colour palette, setting the dusky, sombre, almost monochrome tone of ‘Over Your Head Forever’.