At the Threshold Between the Safe and the Unsafe–"The artist is a suspect; anyone can question him, arrest him and drag him before the cadi; all his words, all his works can be used against him," wrote the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in his essay on Masson. The time, when artists in the West were suspected of creating works that tore apart the dense web of prevailing norms, when they went beyond what was considered morally reprehensible or, nowadays, politically incorrect, seems to have largely passed. Today, anything goes, and provocation is just a likely means of attracting media attention to eventually be absorbed into the all-defusing mainstream. But there are exceptions, such as Sue Williams. Born in Chicago Heights in 1954, she studied at CalArts in the 1970s, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is not a self-proclaimed provocateur who indulges in subversion, even if she does spontaneously, almost timorously, utter phrases like "the art world can suck my proverbial dick". Rather, she is an artist committed to sincerity, who takes every liberty to say what others consider unspeakable. Tapping into the sources of her anger without becoming moralistic, she causes irritation, if not shock, among those who hold back anything that might offend or hurt others. Perhaps, moving away from the notions of good and evil, she is something of a passionate immoralist. Let us look at Williams’ work in its entirety. Early on, she practiced an almost shameless and boundless gaze, using cartoons to express things that were usually kept quiet in public, such as "social norms around gender inequality", "domestic violence", "sexual taboos” and “the oppressive structures of patriarchy" (Sue Williams). In her more recent paintings, she completely breaks away from the at times sarcastic way of depiction. The question inevitably arises as to what prompted her to make this huge leap. What is the deeper meaning of this turn? What is her motivation? Is it simply the desire to develop her form of painting based on her earlier drawing? Or does it have to do with the fact that her anger has cooled or fully disappeared over the years? Or is the visual language of cartooning no longer sufficient because its spontaneous vocabulary has become too simplistic, and because she is looking for an expression that facilitates a broader associative space? She perhaps wants to give us, and herself, more freedom to immerse in a world made up of bright colors, full of fragments without boundaries, dynamically expanding in all directions and reaching far beyond the edges of the picture. We discover an unmanageable allover. And the art of finding one's way through it must be learnt, if only because there is no predetermined visual path engraved on the images, which we as viewers are to follow. Our eyes can plunge into the confusion of forms here or there and start the journey into the unknown from wherever they like. They can move from right to left or from bottom to top, from left to right or from top to bottom. The movement they perform appears to us as a pure effect of our whim and has not the slightest thing to do with what the emptiness of the canvas is filled with. Yet the abstract and the figurative are combined, interwoven, and mixed in a way that it is difficult for us to make a qualitative distinction between the two. Indeed, at times, it seems as if the possible meaning of the figurative signs is melted by the fact that they are barely distinguishable from the abstract forms, the colored blobs, and stains, and form a loose connection with them for the sake of appearances. As in de Kooning's work, Williams merges disjointed figuration with an abundance of autonomous lines and zones of color. The figurative recedes completely. As viewers, we are forced to fish for readable signifiers out of the swirls and whirlpools of this allover, as if from an endless sea. Naked bodies, genitals, animals, body parts, orifices, symbolic organs, plants, everyday objects or amorphous forms, everything is arranged on a white or pale monochrome ground in such a way that these elements seem to float above it like islands, almost weightless. The collective whole, in which nothing has priority, and everything is of equal value, turns out to be an unrelated juxtaposition, held together only by rhythms and energies. No matter how we twist and turn the things we recognize, they elude interpretive access. The refusal to construct connections becomes evident.  As in her earlier work, Sue Williams' most recent paintings want, as she says, "to blur the ambiguous threshold between the safe and the unsafe, the real and the imaginary, and to encourage discussion of political issues such as feminism and sexuality". Heinz Norbert Jocks