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Art Basel’s Unlimited sector is dedicated to large-scale works that go beyond the limits of a traditional booth, and Didier William’s Gesture to Home fits this context in a natural and powerful way: the scale of the paintings, the physicality of the sculptural elements, and the way the work activates the space around it all speak directly to what Unlimited was created to support.In this series, William views the Gulf South’s bald cypress trees as witnesses of history, given their ability to live for over a thousand years. These ancient trees, some predating European colonization, have witnessed cataclysmic disasters and human impact, from the transatlantic slave trade to the Louisiana Purchase and the evolving regional landscape.
“Most cypress trees will remain tall and straight even when they appear to be hanging on by mere threads.”
— Didier William -
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Gesture to Home, first presented at Prospect.6 in New Orleans, is a large-scale installation that merges painting, sculpture, and spatial design into a unified environment. Central to the work are a series of towering paintings of bald cypress trees—a species native to Louisiana, where the project originated. William doesn’t depict these trees simply as elements of the landscape; instead, they serve as active, symbolic figures. Their forms evoke postures and gestures that mirror the human body in motion or engaged in ritual.
The installation features monumental figures emerging from the trunks of these trees, each adorned with carved eyes that gaze outward in all directions. Surrounding these figures are monumental paintings of trees, with branches extending beyond the picture plane. Together, the sculptures and paintings invert the traditional dynamic, transforming humans—typically nature's observers—into the ones being observed.
William, who immigrated with his family from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to Miami at the age of six, explores in his work constructions of Blackness, emphasizing the nuances of diasporic identity and his own lived experiences.
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Didier William
Gesture to Home (detail), 2024Acrylic on panel
269.2 x 162.6 cm (106 x 64 in.) -
Gesture to Home draws on William’s own experience as a Haitian-American artist, and his interest in how identity, geography, and memory are shaped by movement and displacement. The Louisiana swamps—both lush and historically weighted—act as more than a setting; they become a kind of archive. William has described the cypress trees as holding geological, historical, and ancestral meaning. In this sense, the installation becomes a space where nature, migration, and cultural memory are deeply connected.
“The cypresses function as a historical archive, as well as an ancestral and geological archive".
— Didier WilliamIn Gesture to Home, William reimagines the cypress trees as transhistorical vessels of the energy embodied by these omnipresent eyes. In the sculptures that are several meters tall and carved with countless eyes, figures rise upward from tapering mounds, their forms buttressed like the trunks of the trees. This interplay creates a circuit of interaction between the observer and the observed, dissolving the boundaries between subject and object and alluding to the asymmetrical power dynamics of colonialism.
The artist reflects: “In the earlier and more recent paintings, by the time you get close enough to see that these are carved eyes, you realize they are looking back at you just as intently as you’re looking at them.” For William, the eyes symbolize a return of the gaze, challenging the possessiveness of sight. They act as a kind of armor, defining the figures as active, dynamic entities intertwined with the woodblock-patterned fabrics and reaching limbs around them.
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Gesture to Home (detail), 2024Acyrlic on Panel269.2 x 152.4 cm (106 x 60 in.)
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From left to right: Didier William, Gesture to Home (detail), 2024, ink on carved epoxy resin, EPS, wood, and steel, 249.8 x 83.8 x 82.5 cm (98 ⅜ x 33 x 32 ½ in.); Gesture to Home (detail), 2024, ink on carved epoxy resin, EPS, wood, and steel, 304.8 x 180.3 x 120.7 cm (120 x 71 x 47 ½ in.); Gesture to Home (detail), 2024, ink on carved epoxy resin, EPS, wood, and steel, 241.3 x 101 x 132.1 cm (95 x 39 ¾ x 52 in.)
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Didier William,
Gesture to Home, 2024
Ink on carved epoxy resin, EPS, wood, and steel
249.8 x 83.8 x 82.5 cm (98 ⅜ x 33 x 32 ½ in.)
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Didier William, Gesture to Home, Art Basel Unlimited, 2025
Didier William, Gesture to Home, Art Basel Unlimited, 2025 -
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