Julio Cesar Williams has been my coworker for 5 years but I am only now seeing his painting in person. In his studio in Bushwick, he shows me Yearning for Eternity, a 6’x4’ raw canvas covered with semi-transparent washes. A profoundly slow read, the piece coaxes me to think about the unlimited subtleties in the physical properties and material components of painting.
My entry point is the raw canvas Julio used. Its visible weave creates a textured negative space, imposing structure as form. The raw canvas supports semi-transparent washes of closely valued grays, blues, pinks and yellow that hover above or sink into the surface, and culminating in one translucent mass. All washes intertwine by the absence of pigment, evoking the “lifting” technique in watercolor, when water is dabbed on the paper to remove paint. Julio explains his process of using dispersions that vary in density and fluidity. He first applies translucent layers of urethane binders, polyvinyl molding paste or heavy gel gloss. Already absorbed into canvas, they create unpredictability to how pigment reacts as it is drying. He has to work quickly before the medium dries.
Applied with a wide brush, the strokes sweep in a circular motion with no stopping point, each mark making contact with the canvas from a few inches to a few feet. When closely following one mark to the next, one discovers occasional deviations, like a sharply defined edge created by the gently orchestrated areas of resistance, where the first layer of clear medium, which the pigment could not penetrate, was applied. Another unexpected contrast is that only once, and only for a few inches, is the pigment ever saturated enough to reach opacity. I think of Rothko’s soft-edged color fields, the motion in Turner’s foggy seascapes, Cy Twombly’s rapid scribbles, and Agnes Martin’s minimal meditations of similar value.
Like remnants of a dance, the brush strokes imply that he must have reached above his head and kneeled on the floor to apply them. (I would like to see the path of Julio’s footsteps as he approaches and moves away from the canvas, contemplating and then acting on his next move.) As when looking up at the clouds, my brain wants to find recognizable shapes. The palette of the glowing washes triggers a memory from early childhood of the sun shining through a striped cotton sheet hanging on the clothesline, temporarily tapping into that long dormant feeling that the world was fascinating, new, unknown, huge and mysterious.
In silent concentration, Julio organizes his paint swatches as I write my notes, both of us deep in thought, a coworking dynamic we’ve had one hundred times before. It is special to spend time with this genre of work in the privacy of a studio rather than a public institution. I muse for a long time, without interruption, on this visual example of the empty fullness of Buddhism. I sense the potential in the invisible. Experiencing a body of work like Yearning For Eternity forces you to slow down and find minute differences. I remark that in this type of work, every mark is of consequence because it cannot be painted over. I ask myself, as a figurative painter, “by using paint on canvas only as a vehicle to describe the picture plane spatially and illusionistically, do I take for granted the vast potential for the structure and material properties to be the form and content, in themselves?
We leave the studio and walk in the same direction for a few blocks. He asks what I’ve been painting at school. “I’m excited about inventing forms through a limited palette of warm shadows and cool lights,” I reply. “Ah, I love making subtle light on things,” he says. “Subtle is hard for me,” I laugh. “It’s hard for everyone,” he smiles. Pleased to gain insight into the art practice of my coworker of five years, I recognize that like in his paintings, the subtleties are all I will ever know of Julio as a person, too.