Max Protetch Gallery is pleased to announce its first exhibition of work by Aaron Williams in its project space. The show will consist of works on canvas, works on paper, and sculptures. Each of these works emerges from an epistemological universe created by the artist as a generative conceptual framework. Williams imagines the natural world through the eyes of a pair of teenage characters. The world they see teeters on the verge of destruction: in particular, forest fires animate many of the compositions. It is unclear whether these fires, indicative also of potential rebirth, have been set by the characters or if they simply reflect the world as it appears to them.

Williams combines paint, watercolor, spray paint, and collage in his works on canvas and paper. To create them, he draws from a range of figurative and abstract approaches. And while the world they represent feels decidedly contemporary, they key an idiosyncratic spectrum of art historical references, Cezanne and Turner among them. The hybrid works that result juxtapose meticulously rendered elements of nature (leaves and trees primarily) with more violently-hued sections executed in acrylic and spray paints. Hard-edged images of flames exist in washy fields of smoke painted with watercolor.

Williams’ sculptures also represent this diversity of methodologies. Painted branches, mirrors, paint, glitter and other materials have been employed to create iconic forms that incorporate their surroundings, filling a form with landscape rather than placing a form in a landscape: a tree that seems to have merged with the sky, the cut-out silhouette of the head of a teenager painted in glossy black and covered in glittering stars. The works in All The World Is Renewed By Fire highlight the infinite feedback loops between human action, imagination, and the natural world, and explore how these relationships unite disaster and possibility.