Margaux Williamson’s Detailed Orientations
Margaux Williamson, Shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars, installation view, MOCA Toronto, 2025. Photography by LF Documentation.
Some artists endeavour to precisely depict or resolutely abstract a place or a face, but painter and writer Margaux Williamson is activated by imbuing everything around us with a leveled importance through her dense brushstrokes. While the result could be works that feel flattened in dynamic, Williamson’s deft use of perspective juxtaposition allows familiar scenes and items to come alive instead. Objects, often portrayed by Williamson as charmingly dishevelled through use, roll into one another across her intriguing planes. The effect gives viewers the sense of having been there before, in real life, looking at these things like a chipped dinner plate or garlic bulbs or a couch – but when, and where?
In her solo show Shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars, Williamson follows the direction of notes, and the cues of familiar and found things, to craft paintings that pulse with a sense of curiosity rather than a clear-eyed vantage point. Williamson is pursuing her intuition in making these works, she tells me – a clear of example of which is in the fact that she will add things to a painting to “correct” it, rather than remove something.
My favourite piece from those on view in Shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars – which is at MOCA Toronto until August 3rd – is Weeds. And what I find specifically wonderous about this work is the light emanating from a streetlamp; frenetic lines seemingly electrified by a scorching blend of colours and haloed authority. Its intensity is balanced by another light source to the other side of the creepy alleyway scene; it has a softer sensibility that Williamson treats with the same reverence as its ultra-luminous counterpoint.
Williamson – whose last solo exhibition in Toronto was the quietly beautiful Interiors in 2022 at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection – also painted the MOCA’s inner views for this current show. “Sometimes people are confused,” she says of the questions she gets related to the intimacy of a room they’re looking at. “They’ll ask if it’s my space when they’re looking at a living room painting, for example. And I explain that I’m not representing a space exactly. For this exhibition, I thought it would be nice to have one painting where I’m showing people how I look at a space, and how I paint it. And the MOCA has those gorgeous pillars.”
As the stellar show comes to a close, here’s my conversation with Williamson about the nooks and crannies of Shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars.
Margaux Williamson, Shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars, installation view, MOCA Toronto, 2025. Photography by LF Documentation.
I wanted to begin by talking to you about humble, inanimate objects and lived-in spaces; I'm seeing these ideas used a lot as subject matter in art right now. And there are so many types of exploration here, such as Indigenous artists looking to represent things like condensed milk or Kentucky Fried Chicken – everyday items that have significance to them, particularly in terms of colonialism and ancestry. And I’ve also heard artists talk about wanting to paint everyday objects to try and elevate them and give them a sort of higher status in the world. So I’m wondering, for you, what the attachment is, or the enticement is, in representing the objects and the scenes that you do?
My interest has always been in really seeing something as it is and removing the symbology from it, so that a piece of garbage has the same value as a flower, and a cellphone has the same value as a cabbage. It’s impossible to totally remove symbology – but it’s my preference to essentially think of everything as atoms. I think we do some strange editing when we're looking at things that’s related to value, and what's deemed important and what's decided to be beautiful. But when you’re really seeing what's around you, you can find a bit of a natural harmony.
And how does the perspective-shifting in your work play into this?
I'm never interested in representing a space or showing something whole. But because these paintings are so large, they allow for multiple perspectives and multiple times to be captured, and so they all feel a little bit like studies.
My notes could be ‘dark yard, or river, or living room’; and it’s quite open in terms of what that gets to be. My process typically is that I paint one thing one day, and then another thing another day; these paintings have been made over the course of about eight years. I think it would be too surreal to try to make it comprehensible and blend in those different perspectives and times. Instead, I’m allowing for an exploration of what the perspective looks like – and this is what it looks like tomorrow. It’s not forcing a coherence that isn't there with time.
A favourite detail from Margaux Williamson’s oil painting Table and Chairs (2025).
Would you describe your work as world building?
It’s fun to think about that stuff, but for me, it doesn’t feel like world building because I don't feel like I'm adding worlds to the world – I'm trying to look at the world. If anything, it's like trying to allow for feeling more time and feeling more space.
Speaking of space, it was wonderful to see your warm and inviting paintings in an industrial environment like MOCA Toronto, or in your show Public House at Bradley Ertaskiran earlier this year which I sadly didn’t get to see in person.
I bet these spaces make the paintings seem even warmer. In both cases, there’s a gorgeous grayness to them, and there's nothing that brings out the warmth of paintings more.
To go back to what you were saying before in terms of the looseness of your practice – how does that inform the other work that you do, like writing?
I’d say I’m a very comfortable painter; I don't have any shame or insecurity. I never did with painting – I’m never concerned about being judged or misunderstood. But then when I started writing, I was like, oh my god! I didn't know what I was saying, or what I was doing, and I had shame and confusion. That’s so wonderful though, because when I first started, I just wanted painting to be everything. And every time I try a different medium, I'm shocked and amazed at the limitations and virtues of each of them, and what each medium can afford and what it can't afford, and what it can show you and what it can't show. To realize the simplicity of oh, paintings are flat, and they don't move – it’s such a beautiful place to explore the surface, the reality of the surface, and then the illusion of representation or depth that's not there. It’s a surface that doesn't move, yet can still contain so many hours. That's so amazing.
Writing is a whole different ball game. With painting, it’s a bit like I'm tending to the paintings like a gardener; I'm understanding them, and I'm understanding what they need, or what the limits are of my own intuition with the project. With writing, I'm still learning. What does it mean to edit over and over again? What does it mean to improve or to refine your thoughts? That’s so exciting and fun. It keeps your brain working.
Margaux Williamson’s Shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars is on until Sunday, August 3rd at MOCA Toronto.
