Matthew Arthur Williams’s Exploration of Desire and Vulnerability

A naked man kneels, sword in hand, his genitals covered with some sort of sheath – perhaps a leaf, perhaps a protective cup, although the image is too grainy to be sure exactly. He is somehow both svelte and sculpted, skin pulled tight over rippling muscles. Glasgow-based artist Matthew Arthur Williams found this image, a small vintage snapshot, at a flea market in Paris 15 years ago. For his current exhibition at Stills, Edinburgh, the artist has produced a blown-up print of it, the photograph now rendered as a grid of greyscale pixels (our man and our sword, 2024). Another vintage portrait is reproduced in the exhibition: a naked man perched awkwardly on a white plinth (A Declaration of Our Times, 2015–25). ‘I got really obsessed with them as a duo,’ the artist explains when I talk to him ahead of the exhibition’s opening. ‘They are so vulnerable, but they are also very tough – and it feels very homoerotic. You’ve gone into a studio, stripped down, here are some props.’

The works in ‘In Consideration of Our Times’ enact a similar interplay between vulnerability and toughness. Hung on an adjacent wall to one of the vintage photographs is a self-portrait showing Williams nude and on one knee (In Consideration of Our Times I, 2024). Whereas the vintage snapshot exposes its subject’s crotch, Williams kneels on the other knee – so it is his ass which faces the camera. It’s a playful gesture, mirror-reversing the visuals of the photograph with which he has been so obsessed. Yet there’s still something deeply exposing about the self-portrait. ‘You almost let go of how you see yourself in these scenes,’ Williams tells me. ‘It’s a different version of me, too – when I had long hair. In a way, it’s an archival object.’ Still, it can throw up questions of what is and isn’t comfortable to share publicly. Williams works as a lecturer at Glasgow School of Art; the week before the exhibition opening, the head of his department circulated the press release to the school’s students. The main image on that announcement is a shot of Williams sitting in a red armchair without any clothes on. ‘After she sent it, she came to me slightly panicked and asked, “Was that okay to share?”’ For Williams, however, such exposure comes with the work he does. ‘It doesn’t really bother me anymore,’ he tells me.

The exhibition’s photographic works are presented alongside a film, Another Allegory (2025). It splices 16mm footage of various enigmatic scenes – rain falling on a body of water, a man playing steelpan drums, close-up shots of a tattooed torso – and is accompanied by a voice-over in which someone speaks about a former lover. The line ‘I was just thinking about you’ is repeated over and over, the recording at times being distorted so that the voice sounds like something out of an old science fiction film. The oblique relationship between different elements of the film feels, for want of a more precise term, ‘poetic’ – a word which crops up several times during our conversations. When I ask Williams what the word means to him, he lets out a small laugh. ‘I feel like I live in an absolute delusional world. When I look at some of my work, I think: You are lost in your own nonsense at this point. But I see that as poetry. I really am seduced by the many, many ways in which we can articulate ourselves.’

This poetic quality, leaving certain things open-ended or obscure, also means giving up the illusion of control over how his work is interpreted. ‘If someone doesn’t see the queerness of it, or they don’t see the Blackness of it, or they don’t see the Britishness of it, or whatever it is they don’t see within the work, that’s on them. But I feel like I leave all these holes and portals open because I want extra meaning to come from the viewer.’ Sometimes this takes the work in new directions: the photograph of Williams kneeling was interpreted by some as a reference to NFL footballer Colin Kaepernick, who ‘took the knee’ during the US national anthem at a 2016 game, in protest against racial inequality in the country. ‘You can read it, if you want to, in that way,’ Williams says. ‘If one of my images can have multiple meanings and endings, then it’s done its purpose.’

Desire, in its vaguest sense, still unites these works – from the homoerotic bulging of our man and our sword to the yearning voice-over of Another Allegory. Standing in Stills, I can’t help thinking that Williams’s work is like a good Renaissance sonnet: there is real emotion underpinning this work, but it has been filtered through the artist’s intellect to create something which feels simultaneously formal and fluid, distant and direct. That, after all, is what makes art like this so enticing – the sense that something is constantly moving beyond the reach of our comprehension. As Williams says: ‘I want to be seduced, and I want to seduce the viewer.’

Matthew Arthur Williams's ‘In Consideration of Our Times’ is on view at Stills Centre for Photography, Edinburgh, until 18 October

_{Main image: Matthew Arthur Williams, In the afternoon, I, 25th May 2021 (detail), 2021. Courtesy: the artist and Stills Centre for Photography, Edinburgh}