If television taught me anything, it is that there is no direction more damning to its own cause than ‘Quick: Act Natural!’ Rather than prompting unsuspicious conduct, the line sooner incites bumbling misbehaviour, 'nothing-to-see-here’ whistling and a lampshade atop somebody’s head. Cast it, alongside ‘think fast’ and ‘calm down’, to the sea of phrases that rarely prove useful. Unless, of course, you are figurative painter Robin F. Williams, who has mastered the art of the double-entendre alongside their usual practices.
Robin F. Williams is a Brooklyn-based artist whose works test the limits of language, gender, agency and reality. Following recent shows in New York, Tokyo and Mexico City, Act Natural marks their first solo exhibition in the UK. Oxymoronic by design, the title connects seemingly distant topics like theology and thirst traps to then ask where nature rests in a self-contradicting, techno-futurist society. That is, after all, where we seem to be headed. Politicians diversify their portfolios through meta-bots and ‘looksmaxxers’ before condemning the queer body for its unnatural lifestyle, and I failed to dodge a pile of lawn bindis while telling an internet troll to go touch some grass. But the more layered, liminal or downright baffling the subject, the more keen Williams seems to paint it.
“Painting is so much about imagining things that maybe can’t be captured photo-realistically”, they explain. “It’s a big playground for in-between ideas and identities.”
To borrow and butcher their playground analogy, encountering Williams’ paintings was like engaging in a swing-set discussion with a very good friend. Topics emerged, reframed and interrupted one another as I swung between gouache studies and oil paintings. Combined with their colourful, illustrative style, you get a crystal-clear format encountering the ineffable. Artworks mentioned furthest apart drew the largest parallels in hindsight. Language Model and Medium Mermaid stood as bookends to our conversation, but now I can only imagine discussing them in tandem.
Both involve a hybrid woman —be that a virtual maid (Siri/Alexa) or a mermaid (Sirens/Ariel) – as she stretches, topless, along a shore. Together, the works question the roles, appearances and voices of their predecessors. Why, for example, is a feminine voice and self-denying occupation enough to warrant Siri a bulletproof gender profile? Why is a loudmouth and unusual figure so terrible in a mermaid's possession, better to be traded off for some guy called Eric? Callouts like these reflect the latest direction in William’s decades-long inquest on the representation of female bodies — a journey in which its contradictions are also not lost on the artist.
“It is a complicated line to walk—of painting real and autonomous women and then putting them up for sale”, Williams confesses, “but I’m not going to not paint women because of it; I refuse to take myself out of the game because of a complicated truth.”
Williams' awareness and accountability regarding their career holds a lot more than what can be said for a demographic of their concern. Namely, the artist considers those upholding AI oligarchies and their feigned passivity as a serious issue throughout the exhibition. Tying religion, art history and the gothic sublime into their critique, Williams emphasises the delusion behind building an artificial divinity whilst still hoping to keep it subservient. Suddenly, the audacity that programmed Siri’s obedience returns to my mind; but if I acknowledged every duality lining these works, my writing would span longer than the exhibition’s run. So, I digress — Tempering Better Angels uses fragments of Botticellian Catholic imagery to envision tech-brotherhood as angels led astray. Choir days and Baby Jesus behind them, the boys cling to one another, turned on by their own conversation, as they trudge toward an avoidable demise.
“I imagine the boy at the front is evangelising to the others,” Williams laughs. “He’s saying something like ‘It’s a race. If we don’t get to the front of the line with this technology, then someone more evil will beat us there.’ They believe they are sanctified by the process, but they’re just wading deeper and deeper into the water.”
Luckily for the tech bros, Williams found some ways for them to avoid drowning in a self-manufactured sea. Merminator, for instance, captures the wonder of retiring from an objectively terrible gig. The metallic cop of Terminator 2 forgoes his days as a shapeshifting assassin and escapes to the ocean as a beautiful mermaid.
“You don’t have to build a servant death machine that borrows our likeness and drinks all our water in order to interact with the sublime,” Williams emphasises. “You could go to a swimming hole or flirt with somebody, go on an adventure or make art. We have endless access to other alternatives.”
Removing the lampshade from over our eyes, Robin F. Williams’ Act Natural relishes in the colourful precarities of the world as it stands. Depicting various spectrums of understanding, humanity and divinity as though rings on the same armillary sphere, their London show is critically profound, visually stunning and a very appropriate amount of funny.
For those unfortunately overseas, the literary sketchbook that is the artist’s Substack can supplement some of your FOMO, but rest assured —you are not far removed. I’m pretty sure I just saw you between the tailfins and tech bros.
Act Natural is at Frieze’s No.9 Cork Street in London until October 24, 2026.
Robin F. Williams is represented by P·P·O·W, New York
–Georgia Musumeci