Victor Willing: A Retrospective
9 September 2010 - 2 January 2011
Victor Willing was born in Alexandria in 1928 and died in London
in 1988.
From 1957 until 1974 he and his wife Paula Rego, whom he met at
the Slade School in London in 1953, lived between Ericeira and
London. In 1966 he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis; and in
the same year he took over his father-in-law's electronic parts
company in Lisbon. He returned permanently to London in 1974.
Between 1957 and 1974 he painted intermittently. He returned to
painting full-time and produced a major body of work following his
move to London in 1974. A retrospective exhibition of his paintings
and drawings was held at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1986.
His work has never before been shown in Portugal.
In his paintings Willing endowed objects with palpable presence,
colour and light, embedded in space in a moment of time, suspended
between past and future. Paint is applied rapidly, so as to render
as truthfully as possible the thought behind the image. The
paintings' compositional structure has a carefully adjusted measure
of looseness, resembling drawings on a large scale, inviting the
observer to enter and inhabit the painted scenario. The paintings
executed between 1974 to 1984 are pregnant with the absence as well
as the implied presence of a protagonist, who may be the observer
or the artist himself. The loose structure, openness, and the
physical presence of color and light in space by which the observer
is drawn into the paintings are strategies of the Baroque painters
of the seventeenth century, who thereby created coherent images of
religious, historical, or mythological subjects. Willing adopted
similar strategies in the paintings of 1974 to 1984, endowing
incongruous images arising from reveries and visions rooted in the
unconscious with fullness and truthfulness of physical, pictorial
form. Because the paintings are executed in an immediate, direct,
straightforward manner, the observer is not distracted by
speculation as to what is meant but is left to concentrate on what
is there.
«I think they are scenarios» Willing said in 1985, «where
something has happened or is about to happen but is not happening
at the time. And so they carry with them a mood, and I think this
is what people recognize, because they have fallen into a similar
state of expectation or remembrance when they look at the
paintings».