Franklin Parrasch Gallery is pleased to present the second in a series of two-artist, cross-generational shows in our Chelsea project space (548 West 22 Street): John Altoon | Michael Williams. Two sources of raucous abstraction, the late-Los Angeles artist John Altoon (B. 1925 - D. 1969) and contemporary Brooklyn-based painter Michael Williams (B. 1978) commingle and exchange riffs, each in their own individually formed vocabularies of abstract symbolism.

In the early 1960s, Altoon forged his ethereal style of surreal abstraction in which vaguely identifiable anthropomorphic and zoomorphic images engage in psychosexual scenarios. Once described by Irving Blum (former owner of the famed Ferus Gallery) as “dearly loved, defiant, romantic, highly ambitious and slightly mad … incredibly gifted and absolutely brilliant”, Altoon was the consummate maverick among a generation of maverick Los Angeles artists.

Williams’ paintings embrace an amalgam of abstract tropes that read as arrangements of slowly pieced montage, steeped in sexuality, physicality, and humor – rebuffing the heavy-handedness of the AbEx dogma. Richly pigmented, tube-squeezed paint “noodles” protrude from veils of deftly-layered, airbrushed fields. Williams’ own personally derived symbols propose the language of his paintings. Filtering both light and image, Williams addresses the canvas as a tableaux upon which he builds scenarios of conflating color, texture, and animated information.