THE SERIOUS ART OF PLAY
 A love of color, a passion for paint, an instinct for structure. With these simple tools, William DeBilzan builds his pictorial world. It is
an unfettered world, free of superfluous details and hackneyed specifics, free of commitment to a single style, a world where chance and choice take turns at bat. In this painterly realm, only two rules
apply: for the artist, ”do what you please”. For the viewer, ”see what you wish”. Abstraction and figuration cohabit in DeBilzan’s expressionist pictures.
Even the most intentionally nonobjective works depict, to some perceptions, concrete images brought forth from the depths of the imagination. The ”horizon” paintings, those in
which the canvas is split into two fields of saturated color, one above the other, refer to the landscape. DeBilzan’s choice of rich primary colors, however, often contradicts these
references and we are spun back into a non-referential reading of the work. The same is true in compositions where the arrangement of verticals and horizontals provoke thoughts of
interior scenes or still-lives: these rich surfaces offer an opportunity for any numbers of interpretations.
At the same time, the most obviously representational works resist formal classification as
realism and perch instead on the border of abstraction. DeBilzan uses figurative elements – buildings, children, trees, sun – as the raw materials for constructing loose, colorful
mosaics of blocks, lines and circles. These soft geometries allude to the natural, everyday world of three dimensions, but their bold flatness – where no one element is given
precedence over another – pushes them out of the region of pictorialism and into an area of semiabstract figuration.
In a sense, DeBilzan’s painting relates to a range of post World War II painting traditions in America, from the abstract expressionists in New York to the bay area figurative
painters in San Francisco. His undeniable infatuation with the texture of paint – using thin, ethereal washes in some instances, or applying thick layers of viscous pigment over
textured, contrasting under-painting in others – marks him as a versatile yet controlled manipulator of the medium. Color rules in these works, but structural underpinnings in the
form of the grid or carefully arranged pictorial elements always play a major supporting role. A sense of playfulness and exploration is DeBilzan’s true subject matter – a pure
visual expression of freedom that appeals both to the viewers eye and a desire for an easier more joyful take on life – and art.
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