Museo Giulio Gasparri

“What I most appreciated about Roseanne Williams’ art is her spirit and ability to give herself, as an artist, a direct image, not mediated – i.e. at the mercy of the artificer-critic who, in the field of contemporary art is always called upon to take on the serious responsibility of supplying the key to a plausible interpretation of where the painter, scupltor is either under heavy subjection, or in a passive resignation, almost as pirandellian “as you like it”, and this is not only true of those artists who lack a decisive personality.  Under this point of view, Roseanne Williams represents a refreshing change of pace: in the introduction of her catalogue accompanying her exhibition at Ken’s Art Gallery in Florence, the artist explains, simply and clearly, the motivation behind her artistic choices and techniques, her preferences, her inspiration.  And she does this so effectively and so authoritatively that it really is quite difficult to add anything more, especially for someone like me, who has only recently been exposed to her art and begun to appreciate her talent.  I would simply like to highlight that here we are dealing with paintings immediately suggestive, where chromatic mixtures, strong but not aggressive, give her work such luminous tones that make her (and here I am citing a suggestive definition made by Leon Abramowicz) one of the few authentic “voleurs de lumière“, thieves of light, wondrously suspended between the figurative and the abstract, even if it seems to me that she reaches her best results when her palette is totally liberated from and free of shapes and lines.

Roseanne Williams’ exhibition has at her disposal an extremely unusual backdrop which, up to now, has never been used for artistic events: the halls of the small Archaeological Museum in the medieval borgo of Populonia, once the oil mill of this small community.”
~ Pablo Gorini, Councillor for Art and Culture for the City of Piombino