Margaux Williamson

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Margaux Williamson, “Table and Chair,” 2016

oil on canvas, 63” x 90” (Bailey collection)

A tabletop is rendered in rich browns, its surface embellished with swirling knots and striations that evoke the rhythms of wood grain. It seems to be perpendicular to the wall, yet I also feel like I am hovering above it. Then I start to notice ordinary objects placed on or near this lustrous object: a small red book, a stack of papers, a smart phone. My eyes dart to an empty drinking glass, then to a wooden chair standing on the edge of a floral rug animated by bright pinks, reds and blues. I’m entranced. But the shifting perspectives are also confounding. 

This painting, Table and Chair, is part of Toronto artist Margaux Williamson’s solo exhibition, Interiors, on view until April 30 at the Esker Foundation in Calgary. The show, which spans 17 years of her work, features a selection of large oil paintings and small studies, as well as two large tables covered with scattered notes, photographs, scribbled drawings and clippings from art books, postcards and magazines. These research materials echo the temporal and dream-like quality in the paintings, offering glimpses into the eloquent drift of Williamson’s mind.

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Margaux Williamson, “Window,” 2017

oil on canvas, 63” x 90” (Bailey collection)

Like many artists, Williamson works in a garage behind her home. She paints unremarkable scenes, often rooms in her house or the dim interiors of local bars, places that feel surprisingly familiar yet oddly unsettling. These are not novel subjects, but Williamson gives them new energy through the perplexing spatial relationships she lets unfold intuitively. She might decide to paint a tabletop, yes, but her planning stops there. Instead, she leaves space for discovery.

She gives some objects more weight than others. A blazing fire or a head of lettuce may be meticulously rendered, while table edges fade or things that should be readable are obscured. Often, she flattens pictorial space, populating its frontal reaches with mundane objects such as overripe bananas or emerald liquor bottles that offset the otherwise monotone colour harmonies, leaving larger forms, like tables, to dominate the rest of the picture. Rarely do we see an entire room. 

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Margaux Williamson, “Fire,” 2021

oil on canvas, 70” x 84” (promised gift of Christine and Andrew W. Dunn, McMichael Canadian Art Collection)

While painting has been Williamson’s primary focus in recent years, she is a prolific writer and has also worked with video and performance. This may help explain why so much of her work hovers between still life and moving tableau, emerging as much from the mobility of thoughts, dreams and memories as the static materiality of the everyday objects she encounters at home. 

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Margaux Williamson, “Garlic,” 2019

oil on canvas, 16” x 16” (collection of the artist)

With the overwhelming uncertainty of the pandemic, the often mundane and contingent spaces we live in have become critical sites of refuge and even indulgence. The intensity of those early months of enforced domesticity makes paintings like Desk or Kitchen pulse with familiarity. Snacks get eaten, pillows are tossed on the floor, and liquor bottles sit out, forgotten. These are places we inhabit, with both ease and unease. Seeing them anew through Williamson’s eyes is pleasurable for our senses even as the ground shifts unpredictably around us. ■

Margaux Williamson: Interiors at the Esker Foundation in Calgary from Jan. 21 to April 30, 2023. The show is curated by Montreal-based Jessica Bradley and circulated by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont.

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