GAME ART: IAN WILLIAMS' VIDEO GAME PAINTINGS
Not your average "video game paintings"... Truly interesting example of artistic remediation, filtered through a conceptual, rather than merely aesthetic, filter.
Ian Williams’ practice is concerned with understanding the reality of virtual environments through painting. Using found objects from video games, he utilises the conventions of Still Life painting to explore the properties of the virtual everyday object.LINK
Ian Williams’ practice also engages with visual perception in our digital age. His works follow two streams: representational paintings drawn from scenes in video games, and their cerebral interpretations. The latter replicates the gestures of the former to reference the virtual side of the screen. Fallout is the cerebral partner of such a pairing. This loosely-rendered painting sees an ancient, or perhaps futuristic, land, captured in sepia tones and heavy chiaroscuro. The forms are abstracted to their simplest gestures and bathed in glowing light." (Melissa Loughnan, Painting/Not Painting 2017)
Working from the screen to the canvas, Ian Williams transcends physical land in favour of laying down its essential and infinitely variant counterpart: digital landscape. Herein, nature can be clicked on, inverted, rotated, designed, accelerated or brought to a standstill. The terrains Williams paints have no depth or history. Rather, they’re made of layered surfaces: a rendered surface in digital game space; the flat computer screen; the face of a canvas. (Sheridan Coleman, Parallels of Place 2017)