Constructed from meticulously painted wooden dowels set against a painted ground, Polyrhythmic Phantasm, 2025 extends Williams’ visual language beyond the canvas into relief and object. The individual elements are arranged in stacked, totemic formations that establish a measured sense of rhythm and vertical balance. Each dowel functions as both discrete mark and material unit, echoing the dense, accumulative logic of Williams’ pointillist surfaces while introducing a more explicitly spatial register.

The vertical structures evoke forms associated with ancestral and ceremonial sculpture, reflecting Williams’ ongoing engagement with global visual traditions and the formal languages encountered throughout his travels, including FESTAC ’77 in Nigeria. During that period, Williams spent time with artists in Benin City, where he was introduced to local studio practices and traditional bronze casting. In one encounter, he was presented with a cast bronze figure—an experience that became a lasting point of reference in his thinking about figural presence and symbolic form.

Rather than operating as direct citation, these experiences register as formal and structural echoes within the work. In the assemblages, painted elements accumulate into upright configurations that suggest presence without representation, where memory, rhythm, and structure converge into a condensed visual system. The result is a new series of work that extends Williams’ painterly concerns into sculptural space through repetition, stacking, and spatial articulation.