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At first, I found it difficult to describe, but as I was walking home from Justin Williams’ studio, I realized that, once again, I felt as if I had entered a similar kind of borderland or inter-zone—although on this occasion I had been fully awake. Seeing his paintings, I had the feeling of being immediately surrounded by scenes, shapes and silhouettes that struck me as strangely familiar and yet unfamiliar at the same time. I somehow felt as if I knew these figures all too well—and then again, not at all. Exactly, I thought, as I reached my flat: it was as if I had crossed paths with all these figures beforehand, in some distant dream.
- Justin Williams
- The man from sassafras creek road , 2026
- Oil , and raw pigment on canvas
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- 51 ×
- 42 ×
- 4.5 × cm
- 20 1/16 ×
- 16 9/16 ×
- 1 3/4 × inches
- Justin Williams
- I hope we will all sit under the moon and stars together , when both our thoughts and stories end at once , 2026
- Oil, acrylic and raw pigment on canvas
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- 189.5 ×
- 171 ×
- 4.5 × cm
- 74 5/8 ×
- 67 5/16 ×
- 1 3/4 × inches
- Justin Williams
- An act that might have once felt strange and awkward, now was already a memory , 2026
- Oil, acrylic and raw pigment on canvas
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- 180 ×
- 120 ×
- 4.5 × cm
- 70 7/8 ×
- 47 1/4 ×
- 1 3/4 × inches
- Justin Williams
- We stayed awake to keep watch over the deceased , 2026
- Oil, acrylic and raw pigment on canvas
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- 190 ×
- 170 ×
- 4.5 × cm
- 74 13/16 ×
- 66 15/16 ×
- 1 3/4 × inches
A short while ago, I learned that Justin L. Williams had entitled one of his recent paintings To Sleep Walk One’s Self into Another Man’s Voice (2025). It made good sense to me because, when confronted with his work, I felt as if I had been journeying on the thresholds of different realms of existence. To me at least, this instability is what is always at stake in Justin L. Williams’ painting. Somehow bordering on the abstract, these paintings, like few others, manage to represent in-between worlds, prompting a (re)encounter with familiarly unfamiliar characters and thereby evoking Freud’s idea of the “uncanny”¬—that peculiar sensation of something being at once recognisable and yet disturbingly alien. Or, put in related terms: archetypal motifs so vivid that they compel you to question whether these figures, landscapes and settings are utterly real or entirely imaginary—or whether they exist in an intermediary realm.
- Justin Williams
- He had to say goodbye to more than his own skin , 2026
- Oil, acrylic and raw pigment on canvas
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- 121 ×
- 92 ×
- 4.5 × cm
- 47 5/8 ×
- 36 1/4 ×
- 1 3/4 × inches
- Justin Williams
- He observed one’s self thru a vailed mirror , 2026
- Oil, acrylic and raw pigment on canvas
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- 190 ×
- 171 ×
- 4.5 × cm
- 74 13/16 ×
- 67 5/16 ×
- 1 3/4 × inches
- Justin Williams
- Edgar came home with a new red jacket , 2026
- Oil, acrylic and raw pigment on canvas
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- 51 ×
- 42 ×
- 4.5 × cm
- 20 1/16 ×
- 16 9/16 ×
- 1 3/4 × inches
Such tropes of in-betweenness also reside at the heart of Deceased Estate, in which Justin L. Williams sets out to investigate spaces, places and people existing in a transitional state or period. That travelling through different times and worlds goes hand in hand is surely something we are all painfully experiencing today, at a moment when our world suddenly feels both familiar and yet so unfamiliar. That’s the thing: have our generations ever experienced a period in history that has felt so liminal? Has Antonio Gramsi’s quip: “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters” ever felt so close to reality? And, consequently, hasn’t the whole world become somewhat uncanny today? I believe so. And if there is a grain of truth to this hypothesis, then we cannot underestimate the importance of a painter trying to come to grips with the deceased state this leaves us all in. And why? Because twenty years after my own sleepwalking came to an end, we all seem to be doing exactly the same thing today.
— Nikolaj Schultz
- Justin Williams
- Perhaps David wasn’t the one who was lost , 2026
- Oil, acrylic and raw pigment on canvas
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- 189 ×
- 169.5 ×
- 4.5 × cm
- 74 7/16 ×
- 66 3/4 ×
- 1 3/4 × inches
Entering Justin Williams’ painting is like nostalgically stepping into an ancestral world, suspended between myth and memory. His matt surfaces, sanded down to the grain, appear to have the same texture as an ancient wall; His palette of browns, ochres, greens and purples is illuminated by blues and yellows. Beyond their apparent naivety, his canvases reveal great sophistication, blending Outsider Art and Symbolism punctuated with decorative flourishes. Heir to his grandparents’ migration from Egypt to Australia, Justin Williams paintings explore deracination and family as well as the mysterious realms of forests and mountains. From his studio on the Sunshine Coast near Brisbane, he celebrates the rustic beauty of the world, more inspired by the fragility of life and the warmth of human connections than by any quest for the perfect line.
Born in 1984 in Melbourne, Australia, Justin Williams’ work has been the subject of numerous solo gallery exhibitions including COMA (Sydney), Forma and L’Inlassable (Paris), Roberts Projects (Los Angeles), the Vigo Gallery (London) and the Silas von Morisse Gallery (New York). In 2024, he participated in the collective exhibition New South: Recent Painting from Southern Australia at the Hazlehurst Art Center in Sydney. His works feature in major collections across the world, both public, such as the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art, and private, including the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection (The Bunker, USA), the Arndt Collection (Australia), the Buxton International Collection (Australia), the Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art (China) and the agnès b. Collection (Paris). His work has been widely acclaimed by the press and has appeared in numerous publications such as Juxtapoz, It’s Nice That, Art Now LA, Esquire, etc.
