William Adjété Wilson

“Du monde dans le moteur”  © William Wilson

Name: William Adjété Wilson

URL: http://www.williamwilson.fr
Bio: William Wilson was born in Tours, France en 1952, his mother was from  Orléans and his father of Togo-Benin origin. He grew up in Orléans. At 18 years of age, he went to Paris to study philosophy and ethnology. When he discovered the world of art and artists he decided to become a painter. After numerous trips to Europe and West Africa, (1970-1980) interspersed with various jobs in journalism and music, he held his first exhibition in Paris in 1976. But it’s from 1983 that he regularly exhibited his work, in France, Europe and Africa, followed by the USA. In 1986, he received the Prix de la Villa Médicis Hors-les-Murs and spent more than a year in the US.

At times Wilson works in collaboration with other artists. He has worked with Dominique Bagouet on the  décor and costumes for a dance piece Les petites pièces de Berlin. He has also designed scarves for Louis Vuitton, and worked for Rodier, and for Arches shoes. He has been an illustrator for publishers such as Gallimard, Folio, Flammarion, and for magazines, such as New Yorker, Zurich's Du, Télérama and Libération. He has also designed posters for cultural events.

In 1994, he spent three months travelling with writer Isabelle Jarry in the American South-West. On his return he produced a series of 11 huge pastels (150 X150 cm) Le voyage en Arizona.

Medium:  Pastel; sculpture; wooden constructions; prints; collage.

Subjects: Impossible to classify – from mandala-like paintings to folk-art, occasional hints of Miro…

Isabelle Jarry has this to say of him: Chance, more often than we think, presides over the destinies of men. And the reasons why an artist chooses one medium over another remains unclear, imprecise, as if lost in the distant past. Unless the time has not erased the memory, blurred as by a finger a patch of colour that you want to soften ... It seems, to hear William Wilson, that the decision to use pastels was independent, without forethought, without any justification other than the pleasure of finding the coloured chalks of childhood and the desire to explore the wealth of material that is spread with the fingertips, without an intermediate tool. He liked the matt appearance, too, the powdery aspect, a tribute to the powders of ochre and earth used by African artists on their masks and sculptures, and also for ritual paintings made ​​directly on the skin. But if chance slips everywhere, it is not therefore blind and deaf, and can we not, once again, let chance be the emcee when we learn that William Wilson’s first exhibition opening took place in a studio lent by a friend, lover of parrots? During the three days of the exhibition, four pairs of parrots, left free by their owners, traced in the sky of the huge glass-ceilinged atelier streaks of red, green, yellow and white, animating the colors of the pastels hanging on walls, hammering the ears of visitors with their screams. Movement, colour and freedom, the tone was set.

Style: Matches his subject matter.

Navigation: Links available at all times at side

Gallery: For the pastels, click Oeuvres, then select Pastels

Image View: Thumbnails run along bottom of viewer and enlarge therein. Information is provided if you click on Infos in top left corner of viewer. Du monde dans le moteur is from the Arizona series. It is 150 x 140 ins cm.  640 x 480, 56 KB.