Robin F. Williams is not afraid of the dark. Their current paintings explore the roles and fates of women in horror films, particularly B-movie slashers. When I visited Williams’s Greenpoint, Brooklyn studio, I was immediately drawn to the storyboard wall of studies in sanguineous gouache. There was Carrie at prom, doused in pig’s blood, horrified and humiliated. There was Sally Hardesty, blood-smeared on the bed of a pickup truck, in a crying and laughing fit. In Williams’s treatment, the young women become agents of their narratives. Carrie looks annoyed, inconvenienced; Sally is reveling in the thrill of escape.
The studies represent a body of work spanning three gallery shows: Watch Yourself at Morán Morán, Mexico City, in late 2023; Undying at Perrotin Tokyo this past spring; and a long-awaited (by me) return to P·P·O·W in New York City this fall. Williams’s female figures, which range from the photoreal to the highly stylized and gender ambiguous, invite viewers to howl at the moon, go after the murderer, and fall recklessly in love. Many of them have been brought together at Williams’s survey exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art (CMA), We’ve Been Expecting You.
Michael Londres
In these studies and recent works like Slumber Party Martyrs (2023), you’re depicting more collective experiences of female terror.
Robin F. Williams
There’s a horror trope of women peeking out from behind a curtain or door and having a heightened sense of intuition that something’s wrong. Sometimes, it’s a group of women sharing in the recognition. The film The Slumber Party Massacre ends with the Final Girl, but the togetherness lasts longer than usual. It’s one of the worst, or what would be considered a true B-movie slasher, in that it borders on porn—a guy with a long electric drill terrorizes young women at a slumber party—but it has the most compelling images. I mean, I’ve made at least three paintings from it.
ML
The guerrilla filmmaking and disregard of mass appeal allows for a playful leaning into tropes.
RFW
There’s less concern on the side of the filmmaker to be an auteur and put their own spin on the genre, and there’s a folklore aspect to the retelling and repurposing of tropes. There’s also usually a kind of gender slippage. The viewing experience is all about eliciting a physical reaction from the audience by getting them to identify with the protagonist who is almost always a woman.
ML
You’ve talked before about women serving as vessels in art and feminine emotions being more codified.
RFW
We live vicariously through these feminized emotions, which are human emotions. For me, it’s about gaining access to the full range of emotions that we’ve decided are appropriate only for certain genders at certain times. I come to these movies not because they’re some perfect feminist or queer-theory answer; they’re a naked history of what we’re afraid of, what we desire, what we’re afraid we desire. They offer a shared cathartic release. Of course, because it’s collective, it’s considered lowbrow.
ML
Horror operates on the uncanny. You’ve invoked René Magritte’s treachery of images to describe the interplay of abstraction and figuration in your work. Total abstraction obfuscates meaning, while faithful representation reduces a work to pure image. Where does this body sit in that tension?
RFW
When I’d find a scene that felt like a painting, I would photograph it with my iPhone, and I was getting these moirés of the two screens interacting. I love that awareness of the filters of media you’re viewing a woman through, which often become invisible. We’re so entranced by images of women that we conflate women with the thing they’re tasked to sell or the character they’re paid to portray. We lose a sense of their humanity and the art they’re making. So, especially in the Mexico paintings, I incorporated these screen distortions. The Tokyo show was more about color distortions. The paintings are of couples in the throes of passion, inspired by vampire films and the works of Joan Semmel, who painted sex scenes at a time when feminism was extremely anti-porn. She made bold color choices to remove immediate associations with an image and get viewers to interrogate how they’re interpreting the bodies.
ML
I love the idea of using an old medium like oil paint to implicate viewers and challenge their relationship to new media. Conversely, some of the movie stills you choose to paint echo scenes from art history.
RFW
Slumber Party Martyrs is compositionally based on Georges de La Tour’s Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene. In horror, we see women in the throes of something heightened, overwrought; and there are paintings of nuns having ecstatic, orgasmic reactions. We love these paintings in the Louvre, but we look down on horror movies. I wanted to compress them but weave in distortions that appear to live inside the image, as though the emotions of the female figures were affecting the media with their spoon-bending power.
ML
There’s the conspicuousness of material, and there’s the trademark self-awareness of your figures.
RFW
I love playing with that dynamic. They know they’re paintings. They have a consciousness. When the Édouard Manet-Edgar Degas show was up at the Met, I had to see Olympia, my favorite painting. Whenever I get the chance to see it, it’s like a pilgrimage. I almost missed the show. I had been living upstate with a new puppy on a crate schedule. I was running, sweating to stand in front of that painting, where I cried. The figure that’s looking at you seems so aware of your presence. The whole tableau is a naked awareness of the gender, class, and race dynamics in that brothel.
That self-awareness was a way for me to paint women. Early on, I made a show about men in repose, whose participation in the project of Manifest Destiny got derailed by their own existential crises. I was trying to talk about gender but had this fear that painting women would only re-objectify them and create more images of women for consumption. How do I make them agents in the experience of being viewed? When no one cared about the men, I thought, what do I have to lose?
ML
With the liberation in content came formalistic freedom.
RFW
I was hiding in oil because it has this seriousness to it. I asked myself, why not experiment with mediums and techniques I wasn’t familiar with? I tried airbrush, poured paint, and marbling techniques, inspired by hobbyist painters on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, which, again, some people consider low because it’s democratized. Now, things have come full circle. I’m only working in oil. When I got into horror, it was so much about these feminized aspects, raw emotion, and the unraveling of certainty. I didn’t want things so plotted out. Paradoxically, what made me most uncomfortable was going back to oil, which allows me to work more intuitively and make decisions at scale.
ML
Tell me about Dear Jane (2024), the singular new work in the CMA show.
RFW
It plays on the trope of women crawling on the ground in, for example, Blue Velvet or rape-revenge movies like I Spit on Your Grave. In my mind, she’s reading a breakup letter in some interior space, but it doesn’t have to be that for the viewer. There’s loose change scattered along the carpet that could be cobblestone, and there’s light outside the window that could be reflections on water. In the painting, the expression on the woman’s face is more pissed, while it’s more heartbroken in the study. It’s so subjective and goes back to that idea of a liminal space of gender ambiguity, that secret cavern of emotion and creativity that women are socialized into and men are policed out of. I’m so lucky that I get to just say, no, her face should be a tiny bit different, then make adjustments with a fine brush or my pinky. I get to roll around in those nuances and let them captivate me.
ML
The exhibition We’ve Been Expecting You is a homecoming and reunion with your earlier work.
RFW
There’s this weird symmetry. I lived in Columbus for the first eighteen years of my life, and I’ve made this work in New York for the last eighteen. These paintings have helped me understand myself and ushered me into adulthood. I’m excited to see them become animated in this new space with paintings they’ve never been with. I’ve joked that it might feel like a high school reunion with my paintings.