“Baroque painting is images with the emotion button turned to 11”, says artist Charles Williams. “It’s full-throttle painting, pushing at the edges of the canvas, bursting out into our world, rich meat, revelling in skin and blood and material. It’s carnal”.
The energy of Baroque and Rococo work from the 17th and 18th centuries inspired Williams to bring together a collection of contemporary painting that draws on these historic themes.
The work by John Bartlett, Joana Galego, Zebedee Jones, Andrea Medjesi, Rupesh Pushpa Sudhanshu, Kevin Sinnott, Eugenia Vronskaya, Lisa Wright and Williams himself is now on display in an exhibition at New Art Projects entitled Baroque / Rococo.
For this show, Williams has asked contemporary artists he admires to respond to these ideas.
“By inviting these particular painters, from different cultures, times, and places, to gather their work together, I meant to explore some of the ways the different paths they’ve taken might elucidate art history and the history of their paintings and, I suppose, their lives”, says Williams.
Each painting we see reflects historical concerns in a unique way. The Blind Beggar by Bartlett is a magisterial large canvas of a contemporary homeless person depicted as a quasi-biblical figure, alluding to Guercino’s Elijah being fed by Ravens.
Jones offers his own version of Study for The Calling of Saint Matthew after Caravaggio’s work of the same name: with figures blurred almost to abstraction, the new picture feels remarkably like that of the old master, even if done in a very different style.
By contrast, Vronskaya’s delicate pastel The Portrait of a Horsewoman recalls Rembrandt’s De Poolse ruiter with similar composition but a rather different emotional palette.
Williams’ own painting Alan, Gryff and John harks back to Carracci’s The Lamentation with a lovely carnivalesque vibe.
Going back and forth between generations reveals as much about the painters as it does about their sources. As Williams says: “This exhibition is about histories. Not only art history, with which we artists all have twisted, contested relationships, but personal histories too”.
Baroque / Rococo
Until 18 April 2026
New Art Projects
357 City Road, EC1V 1LR
