LON Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Low to the Ground, by Paul Williams.

If you've lived around the southern suburbs of Sydney for the last decade, you may have spotted a dinged up silver Commodore cruising past your street. It moves low to the ground, with mag wheels and tinted windows, rear spoiler and a long antenna. The drivers' elbow leaning out in the breeze, sunglasses covering his calm, wandering eyes. He glances in your direction but quickly moves on, he's intent on other things. His interest lies in the ornamental and the kitsch, in the textural and in the architectural, in the aged and the quickly disappearing, he's looking for patterns in things, searching for scenes he can use, like a stone path leading to a diamond patterned garage door, or a spider web hanging from a letter box glistening with morning dew, or a hedge that looks like a hairpiece on a carefully manicured lawn, or a timber trellis with palms poking through its gridded patchwork ...

If you've seen this car coasting through your neighbourhood, don't be alarmed. It's just Paul Williams collecting ideas and images for his artistic practice; gleaning forms from the suburban landscape through the window of a slow moving vehicle. Committing to memory the many shapes and textures of inanimate things he sees on his commute to work, to conjure up later in his studio paintings, drawings and ceramic objects.

Williams uses memory and experience of place to create scenes and motifs of the mostly overlooked, fast fleeting and nostalgic, from within suburban and domestic environments. His process driven, studio based practice, engages with different materials depending on the subject which he is investigating. One day he will draw a small observational study of a house on paper, the next he's layering oil paint for a gridded suburban landscape on stretched canvas, yet on another he is spray painting words on a bed sheet, hand building something in clay, then drawing straight from the tube on a monochromatic abstraction on some random piece of Masonite.

Within this somewhat scattered practice however are several unifiers and recurring patterns. Motifs that help to bring together images and ideas seemingly out of time and place from each other. The grid is one such motif in Williams' work, which he utilises as both a pictorial and narrative device. Rather than lending scenes any perspectival space, Williams' grids are always vertical and flat, always painterly, never hard edge. He employs the grid as a way to section off and demarcate interior and exterior spaces, and as a direct reference to the retro world of the suburbs.

In Office Space/California Fade, 2017, a steadily painted latticework with wispy dry-brushed edges divides the entire picture plane. Through the gaps in the lattice grid can be seen some palm trees painted in the same beige colour. In the distance a thin sky smoulders with a classic sunset blended in dusty lilacs, lemon yellows and deep orange. This painting is typical of Williams' recent works in which the grid becomes a visual barrier. The viewer is trapped, forced to look out at the world through small open squares, into the dreamy distance with its fast fading sunset. It's a melancholy scene, as we all know how fleeting sunsets are.

Here exist none of the high formalist concepts of the grid. Instead, in this painting the grid comes as a direct response (and in exact scale) to the wallpaper patterns that completely cover the walls of Williams' studio, a disused office space in Kirrowee.

For as important as his field trips around the suburban streets are, so too is the interior space of Williams' studio. He talks about it being both a depository of ideas, and a site in which he mines spatial, material and technical areas of interest. Williams uses the studio like a jumbled up Trapper Keeper, in which he continuously archives the things he finds interesting from around the suburban streets, but with no real chronol­ogy or hierarchy. In his studio, which has an abundance of well-loved indoor plant life, a large window which looks out over a small industrial area towards the very distant city, shag rugs, and all that beige gridded wallpaper, Williams slowly records and recreates scenes from memory and photographs, scattering meaning through scattered methodologies, layering images and paint on canvas and paper until some motifs remain while others fade away, pushed to the back of the folder for another day.

It is this seemingly sporadic nature of Williams' practice that makes ii all the more engaging as he uses memory to try to stretch a moment into a lifetime, find some beauty in what most consider ugly or kitsch, and attempt to glean some sort of meaning out of the mundane and the mediocre.

- Chris Dolman, October 2018