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Thursday 6 February

William Monk: The Ferryman of Invisible Worlds

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, it is high time we talk about William Monk, born in 1977 in Kingston upon Thames, United Kingdom. Here is an artist who stubbornly refuses to be confined within the comfortable frameworks of our little contemporary art world, choosing instead to navigate the murky waters between figuration and abstraction with an audacity that would make even Rothko blush.

In his large-format canvases that seem to have absorbed all the psychedelic essence of the 1960s, Monk propels us into a universe where reality disintegrates like sugar in an overly hot cup of English tea. His works, particularly those from “The Ferryman” series (2019–2022), confront us with a visual meditation on passage—not the passage of time, but the transition between worlds, between states of consciousness. These enigmatic figures emerging from his colorful landscapes like benevolent specters evoke Heidegger’s concept of “Dasein”, that perpetual dialogue between being and environment, seeking to understand its place in existence.

His landscapes have the unsettling peculiarity of existing nowhere while feeling strangely familiar. This is precisely where Monk’s genius lies: he makes us accept the impossible as self-evident. His uncertain horizons, skies ablaze with improbable colors, bring us back to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, for whom perception was not a passive reception of the external world but a complex dance between perceiving subject and perceived object. When Monk paints a mountain in his “Smoke Ring Mountain” series, it is not so much the mountain itself that interests us but our way of perceiving, feeling, and experiencing it.

What’s most intriguing about Monk is his ability to create works that function as visual mantras. Take his circular canvases from the “Nova” series (2021–2022): these circles, which seem to pulse with an inner energy, literally hypnotize us, forcing us to slow down our gaze, accustomed as it is to the frantic scrolling of social media. These works are meditations on slowness in a world racing to its own demise.

Yet behind this apparent simplicity lies a devilish complexity. Monk plays with our perceptions like a cat with a ball of yarn, gradually unraveling the threads of our conventional understanding of space and time. His paintings are portals, thresholds to other dimensions of consciousness. Here, Henri Bergson’s philosophy comes into play, particularly his concept of “pure duration”, the subjective experience of time that escapes all mathematical measurement. In Monk’s works, time is not a straight line but a spiral drawing us inward.

There is something profoundly subversive in the way Monk uses color. His palettes are both seductive and unsettling, as if seeking to disquiet our own perception. Pale pinks sit alongside electric blues, earthy oranges converse with deep purples, creating chromatic vibrations resonating somewhere between our retina and cerebral cortex. This is what Bergson called the “immediate data of consciousness”—that pure experience before our rational mind catalogs and labels it.

His “The Ferryman” series is particularly revealing of this approach. These mysterious figures standing at the center of his compositions are not mere silhouettes but presences questioning our relationship with otherness. They are there without being there, like benevolent ghosts guiding us toward a deeper understanding of our own existence. One might see in them a perfect illustration of Heidegger’s “being-toward-death”, that acute awareness of our finitude that paradoxically gives meaning to our lives.

Monk’s installations are as significant as his individual paintings. The way he arranges his works in space transforms galleries into true resonance chambers where each canvas dialogues with the others, creating a visual symphony greater than the sum of its parts. This was especially evident in exhibitions like “Psychopomp” at the Long Museum in Shanghai (2024), where his suspended circular canvases created a spatial choreography challenging our relationship with gravity itself.

What’s remarkable about Monk is his ability to maintain artistic coherence while constantly evolving. His series develop like musical variations on a theme, each new iteration adding nuance and depth to the whole. It’s as if each painting were a note in a broader composition exploring the limits of our perception and understanding of the world.

Monk’s treatment of his canvases’ surface is equally revealing. His brushstrokes, sometimes delicate like a caress, sometimes vigorous like a slap, create textures inviting the gaze to lose itself in their meanders. It’s in these details that the depth of his reflection on perception’s nature is revealed. As Merleau-Ponty noted, our perception of the world is not a passive reception of information but an active and constant interaction with our environment.

Monk’s landscapes are not representations of existing places but materialized states of mind on canvas. Take his “Smoke Ring Mountain” series: these misty mountains dissolving into the air are not so much mountains as metaphors for our quest for transcendence. It’s as if the artist were inviting us to climb these imaginary summits to reach a higher state of consciousness, a deeper understanding of our place in the universe.

The influence of music and cinema in his work is undeniable, but Monk doesn’t settle for mere references. He transmutes these influences into something deeply personal yet universal. His compositions often have the rhythmic structure of a musical score, with repetitions, variations, crescendos, and silences. This visual musicality gives his works their hypnotic power.

Light also plays a major role in his work. Whether it’s blazing in his circular suns or diffuse in his twilight landscapes, it always seems to emanate from within the canvases rather than illuminating them from outside. It’s as if Monk had found a way to paint light itself—not as a physical phenomenon but as a manifestation of consciousness.

What makes Monk’s work so relevant today is that he creates spaces of contemplation in a world sorely lacking them. His works compel us to slow down, to truly look, to engage in a form of active meditation that is both a challenge and a reward. In an era obsessed with speed and immediacy, Monk reminds us that some truths reveal themselves only to those who take the time to seek them.

His art is an invitation to inner exploration, a reminder that reality is not always what it seems at first glance. Through his canvases, Monk guides us toward a deeper understanding not only of art but of our own experience of existence. And isn’t that the noblest role an artist can play?

If you think you’ve understood everything about William Monk, then you’ve understood nothing at all. His work is a constant challenge to our certainties, a perpetual invitation to question our assumptions about art and perception. In an art world often imprisoned by its conventions, Monk remains a free spirit, an tireless explorer of the boundaries between the visible and invisible, the known and unknown. And that is precisely what makes him one of the most stimulating artists of his generation.

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