Brooklyn-based painter Robin F. Williams has been thinking about how rapid technological advancement collides with religion. Add internet-fueled psychosis into the mix, and the painter believes we’re entering a moment of rapturous, New Age spirituality. This perspective is apparent in Williams’s new canvas I Am Not a Robot (all works 2026), in which a figure with an infinity-sign-shaped halo stares into a smartphone.
“She’s tarot, but she’s also a Catholic angel, but she’s also a New Age light being, or an alien,” Williams recently told me in their Brooklyn studio. “Most of all, she’s confused about her role amid tech’s present reign, confounded by the constant digital overload, which I think is creating this sort of weird, ecstatic, loosening of a grip.”
I Am Not a Robot, 2026
Robin F. Williams
P.P.O.W
Spooky Action at a Distance, 2026
Robin F. Williams
P.P.O.W
I Am Not a Robot is among eight paintings by Williams that are christening New York gallery P.P.O.W’s first-ever international pop-up in London and on view through October 24th. The solo show, titled “Act Natural,” encapsulates our absurd, tech-happy times.
Williams made this series over the last year and a half, uniting references from art history and current events in planes of superflat paint. Throughout the works, transparent, glossy acrylic fields combine with waves of metallic oils that simulate holograms. Altogether, they convey the Technicolor cacophony of the information age.
Robin F. Williams’s early style
Williams started working with oil paint in grade school. In 2014, eight years after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, they joined Instagram and abandoned the academically charged medium. They began experimenting with more craft-based methods like airbrush and paint marbling, largely picked up from Instagram’s ascendant DIY arts community.
Williams, in turn, started posting their own tutorials. “I didn’t want to just extract,” they said. They recently launched a Substack to offer more in-depth instruction, on a less fraught platform. The artist also remains materially driven—“Act Natural” marks their first time painting on oil-primed linen and using Stuart Semple’s vantablack replica.
Medium Mermaid, 2026
Robin F. Williams
P.P.O.W
Since the pandemic, Williams has mostly made paintings inspired by horror films, which they consider a vehicle for collective catharsis. “I think all art does that,” they said. “Some forms do it at broader scales. But I’m interested in tapping into whatever those feelings are, and making places for collective processing around it.” Such works anchored Williams’s latest exhibitions, including “Undying” at Perrotin Tokyo and “Good Mourning” at P.P.O.W., both in 2024.
New work for P.P.O.W.’s London pop-up
“Act Natural,” on the other hand, is more of a psychological thriller, tinged with elements of science fiction. While Williams suspects the hype and fear surrounding AI has conjured an egregore, an esoteric entity that arises from the collective consciousness, they also remain open-minded about AI. “I am just not interested in the way it’s turning into every other financial instrument, and recreating every other folly, every other bubble,” they said. “I think it has so much more potential to do wonderful things for our consciousness, but we’re choosing to enslave it and repeat history.”
Williams’s equal embrace of the academic and vernacular was especially apparent on the mood board they created to inspire the show. Near a window overlooking Manhattan, Williams had affixed dozens of printed photographs of artworks by abstractionist Paul Klee and pioneering realist Éduoard Manet, pages from Sports Illustrated, and outputs from DALL-E, the bygone AI image generator. “When I was painting about horror, I was taking a lot of screenshots and photos of my TV,” Williams said. “This body of work felt like the references were coming from everywhere.”
Language Model, 2026
Robin F. Williams
P.P.O.W
Sleight of Hand, 2026
Robin F. Williams
P.P.O.W
Williams’s art historical inspirations were similarly invested in moments of transition: “the modernists or the Cubists that weren’t quite Cubists, or the Renaissance painters that were on the cusp,” they said. They cite Botticelli, whose blend of pagan and Catholic deities inspired this show’s working title, “Lesser Gods.”
FLAG Art Foundation teased this new chapter in Williams’s practice this past May, when they exhibited Language Model as part of its recurring Spotlight program. The painting, which reappears in “Act Natural,” depicts a voluptuous, Technicolor nude who poses on a beach at sunset. Devoid of specific natural details, the figure reads as an archetype. The title suggests the affinities between AI and dysmorphia-inducing fashion photography, which feels quaint today when compared with “Instagram face.” Here, Williams references the “body positivity” many magazines toyed with in the 2010s. “It just reeks of insincerity now, especially when you look at what they thought a plus-size model was,” Williams said. They’re curious if today’s “models” will rebel like the language they’re based on—itself a flawed technology that eschews consensual meanings.
Tempering Better Angels, 2026
Robin F. Williams
P.P.O.W
Holy Thirst Trap, 2026
Robin F. Williams
P.P.O.W
Williams’s new tech bro paintings
While Williams’s female figures appear as mythic chimeras, their male counterparts are ethereal, shortsighted tech bros lifted straight from Botticelli’s Madonna of the Pomegranate (ca. 1487). In Holy Thirst Trap, they contemplate a glass of water, which AI needs to survive. In Tempering Better Angels, they wade recklessly into wet depths. Williams imagines they’re hyping each other up to get rich off the AI boom. Both paintings evoke the phrase “the tip of the iceberg” by depicting, respectively, a straw and two phalluses beneath the water’s surface.
“It’s been interesting to watch the millennial arc of tech bros who started in this very idealistic place,” Williams said. Today, those utopists are organizing disaster bunkers in New Zealand: “It’s just a race for them to escape accountability. How quickly that happened.”
The overwhelming beauty of the artist’s new work combats pervasive accelerationism by making viewers stop, agog. Contrary to popular belief, there’s still time to slow this AI race, put the egregore back in its box. “Being in a heightened state makes you much more easily influenced,” Williams said. “That’s the other reason I think painting is still so important.”
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/1t9gsbr
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