Focus on The Olmec-Maya and Now and explain the Style and themes.
The paintings in The Olmec-Maya and Now combine abstract expressionism with figurative depictions of Olmec and Maya icons, symbols and artefacts.  Williams' re-introduction of figurative elements into his paintings marked an important stylistic departure from his earlier work, such as the Shostakovich series, which was entirely abstract. Art critics Mel Gooding, Reyahn King and Leon Wainwright have noted that the fusion of abstraction and figuration challenged viewers, artists and critics, who were used to "artistic rules" that kept them apart. Williams himself described this stylistic change as a "wonderful artistic jump". In an interview in 1987 he explained that approximately ten years earlier, around 1977, he had felt himself to be at risk of "only making paintings [...] like making wall furniture" and of hiding within "borrowed" forms.  He therefore decided to "go right back" – to go back to doing figurative work which incorporated "the symbolic artefacts of [his] own past culture" – so that his work was "no longer recognisable".Thematically, the series explores parallels between what Williams describes as "Maya mistakes" and comparable developments in "modern humanity".  In a note composed for the first exhibition of the series, he explained:The Maya, the greatest Civilization of their time [...] a people who produced a technology from which we are still learning today; these people vanished in a very short space of time [..] due, I feel, to their inability to cope with their technology and the changes their achievements engendered within the metabolism of their living environment and ecology; exactly the position we find ourselves in today.
In 1987, Williams added that everything else in his art was "ancillary" to "the burning urge" to express these parallels.
abstract expressionism Maya Reyahn King Olmec