William Lewis

Curt Goedecke's speech as read by Jan Allén at the William Lewis exhibition opening, Sunday 21st August 2005.

I remember almost ten years ago an exhibition with bronze sculptures that I dubbed Rebirth.

Before that Williams’s artistic path had been about hundreds of landscape paintings. I never saw them. At the time he told me that he’d never reached anywhere.

He left that genre and let his fantasy go. What I first met him Williams work was an abundance of both shape and colours in all possible and impossible materials: elks, trolls a chest of drawers, portraits and pictures from Castro in San Francisco. What that part of the city stands for I think most people know.

I found copper-plate engraving and wooden things in the ceramics. I remember Row at the breakfast table, pyramids. Everything. There was something desperate behind the composition.

But there were jewels, often on foundations shaped as drops. I recall that the exhibition was called Fruits of Winter. Amongst the titles there were names such as Neanderthal projectile, Honoré de Balzac and Don Quijote. That I remember well, a comical character leaning on a hobbyhorse and with a projectile-like weapon in his other hand.

The Balzac figure was an unknown bird in relation to the others, maybe not accidental. He wrote once that the truth of nature will never be the same as the truth of art!!! If art and nature would coincide exact in a piece of art, it would be because of nature, whose coincidental result is endless. Something to think about!

It’s hard to summarize what we meet here. The sources of inspiration are innumerable. When it comes to William Lewis he belongs to the group of artists who stir up the establishment, like Barque and Picasso did last century.

I fell for the country Ireland at an early stage. I remember that my teacher in primary school called Dublin the capital of literature. You only have to mention names such as James Joyce, Liam O’Flaherty, George Bernard Shaw, Jonathan swift and William Yeats.

Oscar Wild was born there. There is an odd connection to Sweden. Wilds father was at the time one of the most talked about doctors and his specialty was eyes. He operated on our Oscar the II. After that the father gave his son the name Oscar.

A cold December day I took t