Lest

Alun Williams presents himself as a history painter. Not in the sense of depicting historical figures: rather, his works explore the history of painting. With considerable humour, the artist calls upon Raphael, Goya, Ingres, Picasso, Miro and Magritte, inviting us look at art with a light-heartedness that tramples all over the weight of history.

In Lest, the artist speaks about Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe and Giuseppe Garibaldi, for example, along with a number of well or lesser known figures that have left their mark on literary, political, scientific or art history. These characters are ultimately pretexts for an investigation into the history of art, thought and representation.

The book itself constitutes a project that is at once artistic, literary and research-based, offering a completely fresh and unexpected manner of debating the subject of painting in general and the work of Alun Williams in particular.