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Galerie Peter Kilchmann is pleased to present Didier William's first solo exhibition in France and his second with the gallery. Entitled Lot Bò D'lo A - a Haitian Creole expression literally meaning « on the other side of the water » — the exhibition presents thirteen paintings realised this year. The ensemble is complemented by a version of his emblematic installation Gesture to Home (2024), originally conceived for the Prospect.6 Triennial in New Orleans in 2024. The installation brings together pictorial and sculptural elements within a complex, immersive spatial environment.Born in 1983, Didier William immigrated with his family to Miami, at the age of six. He spent his childhood, adolescence and schooling there, in a cultural environment that would leave a lasting mark on his personal and artistic path. In 2009, he earned a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in painting and printmaking from the Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut. Today, he lives and works in Philadelphia with his family. He is currently associate professor of Expanded Print at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University.William's oeuvre is distinguished by the mastery with which he combines different techniques and materials. His works are characterized by a rich formal vocabulary, frequently bringing together acrylic, ink and carving on wood panel. From the layering of these media emerge dense visual spaces, oscillating between figuration, memory and narrative openness.
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Water is the starting point of this new series of paintings. It evokes a distance that is both physical and metaphysical: the distance separating those who emigrated from those who stayed, the places left behind from those now inhabited, the living from those who came before them. But for William, water is never merely a border. It is also a threshold, a passage, a space of transformation and metamorphosis, capable of linking different territories as well as different states of existence. This elasticity runs through the exhibition, where landscapes become sites of a memory in motion, never a mere backdrop. The earth is sometimes represented as a body: its flesh, skin, entrails or brain matter surface in the compositions, as if the artist were seeking to extract its memory and probe its history. Several paintings are thus organized on two levels: vast landscapes unfold in the upper part, while another world appears beneath or through their surface — submerged figures, exposed roots, layers of earth.
The human figures that populate William's paintings evoke the Titans of Greek mythology, caught in gestures of resistance and struggle, but also of embrace, support or collective labour. The body thus becomes a site of interdependence: it carries, clings, protects, and is itself carried. In Safe Passage (74 x 52 in.), two figures stand pressed against one another in the middle of a marshy landscape. In the face of sudden displacement and the search for safety, the embrace emerges as a gesture of refuge. A light emanating from the lower part of the composition illuminates this space of protection and tenderness. The marsh, which William associates with a feeling of safety, echoes the landscapes tied to his origins and to the memory of his ancestors. The landscape thus offers a sense of rootedness and continuity.
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Several paintings, including La Bassin (78 x 54 in.), Mirage (50 x 40 in.) and Witness: Racin Ayiti (52 x 74 in.), extend William's exploration of bald cypresses, which begun during a trip to Louisiana in 2023. These trees, which take root in wetlands and withstand erosion and the changing landscape, and can live for hundreds of years, drew the artist's attention for their ability to embody a sense of time that extends far beyond a human lifespan.
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The artist first gave form to this research through his monumental installation Gesture to Home (2024), in which the shapes of the cypresses become the starting point for human-scale sculptural figures. In this body of work, William does not simply depict a characteristic element of the Louisiana landscape: he is interested in their capacity to bear witness to a history longer than that of human beings, and to become the silent guardians of a territory and its upheavals.
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The exhibition also gives the artist the opportunity to give a new place to portraiture. In the painting Granpè (30 x 22 in.), William depicts his father, continuing his reflection on belonging and transmission through soil and earth. In this intimate and psychological portrait, the artist explores the complex forms that filiation can take. Although the relationship between father and son is marked by a certain distance, their bond nevertheless continues through the next generation: having become grandfather to the artist's children, the father remains a present figure in the family history. The portrait thus seems to bring forth a form of emotional closeness that does not necessarily rest on a direct relationship but is also woven through the ties that unite generations.
A second portrait, Respire (30 x 22 in.), reflects a new pictorial investigation. William blurs spatial bearings by incorporating a thick mist, a motif found in several of his recent works. Ground and sky seem to collide until they merge, creating a space in which the figure appears literally deprived of air. Caught in this fusion of ground and sky, the figure is held in a liminal space, between two worlds. At the same time, William sets aside, in places, the woodcut carving that has characterized his practice until now in favor of a more fluid, atmospheric and ethereal application of acrylic. This evolution does not, however, give up the materiality of the surface, which the artist continues to incise and sculpt. The eye motifs, which have become a hallmark of his painting, establish an exchange between the one who looks and the one who is looked at, making the viewer a witness: a witness to history, to the transformations of the landscape, but also to their own position before the work. Looking thus becomes a reciprocal relationship rather than a one-sided position of observation.
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Didier William: Lot Bò D'lo A (The Other Side of the Water): Galerie Peter Kilchmann11-13 rue des Arquebusiers, Paris
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