TOKYO.- Pace will present Noon Day Night, an exhibition of paintings by William Monk, at its Tokyo gallery from June 30 through August 16. Marking the artist’s first solo show in Japan, Noon Day Night will feature new and recent works from Monk’s ongoing series exploring liminality and the metaphysical.
Drawing inspiration from an array of sources, including classic cinema and psychedelic rock, as well as lived experiences and images that accumulate in his subconscious, Monk paints compositions that occupy a surreal terrain of semi-abstraction. Evocative, vibrant, and often mysterious, his paintings are rooted in the rich art historical traditions of the medium. His recurring Sentinel figure—a guide poised at the threshold between worlds—finds a poetic resonance in Japan, echoing the Buddhist notion of higan, or the other shore, and the cycle of death and rebirth and the attainment of Nirvana. This crossing over or going beyond is seen in Monk’s extensive series, in which he develops his otherworldly forms with each iteration. Repetition, he explains, “forces you to look for the variation. It’s like a fractal.”
This exhibition takes its title from the meteorological phenomenon by which the sky, during the middle of the day, darkens dramatically from severe storms, volcanic ash and other particulates, or solar eclipses, cultivating an atmosphere of strange timelessness. A sense of striking, illogical ambiguity cuts across the series included in the show, in which landscapes and architectural elements are neither totally real nor imagined. Holistically, they suggest what French anthropologist Marc Augé termed “non-place,” or an anthropological space where human relationships, histories, and identities are erased. Painted between 2021 and 2026 in London and New York, these works stem from a “non-place,” in a sense, even in their creation.
The psychologically charged nature of these works—enhanced by enigmatic, reoccurring forms such as colorful pillars, ethereal smoke rings, shadowy rock formations, and the uncanny figure of the sentinel, a guard or watcher of crossings and thresholds—speaks to the Celtic tradition of “thin places,” in which the boundaries between the corporeal and spiritual worlds become porous. In his process, Monk applies thin washes of color in layers, allowing them time to dry before adding to their chromatic complexity, to echo the heightened sense of awareness and perception inherent in “thin places.” Inviting viewers to slow down when encountering his works, he aims to open portals to uncharted realms of memory and the subconscious.
Though they obliquely reference identifiable scenes from Monk’s life—including his month-long residency at the Neuendorf House on Mallorca in 2024—as well as films such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the works in Noon Day Night evade a traceable narrative.
“I thought of these paintings as depicting a moment,” he explains, “like an establishing sequence in a film.”
Whereas the sentinel figure appears in full in compositions like Stem I (2024–25) and Sentinel IV (2025), acting as a hinge on the canvas for a hallucinatory Rorschach test, in works such as Underworld (sentinel I) (2025) he is obscured by dense thickets of cacti and rocky peaks inspired by Mediterranean landscapes, emphasizing his role as a spirit guide toward the unknown domain of death. Similarly, while the block-like forms of works like Cactus Garden II (2025) frame the outer edges of the pictorial space, elsewhere, as in Sol Increased (son of nowhere) III (2021–26), they transform into central groups of towering columns, suggesting a kind of alien agency. Uniting the works is a shared palette of hazy greys, pinks, and purples that give way to vivid reds, oranges, and blues. What emerges is a totalizing, enthralling portrait of the artist’s psyche, allowing viewers to step into its unusual glow.
William Monk’s scenographic works tap into the rich tradition of painting. Monk paints enigmatic and vibrant works, using starkly divisional compositions and often works in extensive series that gradually evolve over time. The canvases carry irregular intensities of detail, line, foreground and background, and a sense of repetition breaks down the figuration, creating visual mantras. This rhythm happens throughout Monk’s work, surrendering figurative logic to arrive at something stranger and more powerful. Atmospheric and energetic, these paintings invite a more direct physical connection, drawing in the space between our inner and outer realms of experience.
