Writing

Excerpt from an essay by Karen Wilkin

William Noland is a photographer as well as a sculptor. I believe that the same attention to the world around him that generates Noland's best photographs--recently of wholly absorbed, intensely focused people oblivious to his presence--informs his probings into the possibilities of three dimensions. To put it another way, the sensitivity to the actual that provokes Noland's photographs is manifest in the literal, material expressiveness and the rich visual metaphors of his sculpture. These charged, deeply felt sculptures will resonate differently for each of us. What is constant, whatever the associations they call up, is a sense of imminence, of the likelihood of something's taking place that is out of our ordinary experience. Like the rapt individuals fixated on their private concerns in Noland's recent photographs, his recent large-scale sculptures are at once familiar, strange and utterly convincing. © 1995

Kate Dobbs Ariail

William Noland’s Gambling contains the same carefully calculated geometries as his sculpture, but in them the human presence is made explicit. They are powerful as photographs in terms of light, tones and textures, but they are also astonishing in their intimacy. Noland looks at people gambling in different ways—at hipodromos in Madrid and Montevideo, at the New York Stock Exchange, at the Belmont racetrack, at hunt races in Virginia horse country—and by his acute observation of their concentrated attention, he renders images of basic human truth.

In these pictures there is the calculating, the daring, the waiting, the defeat, and most of all, the recurrent hope and exhilaration that accompany every act of gambling. Each gambler is alone in the crowd, pitting his or her individual action against all the forces of chance. The gamblers are completely committed to their bets, just as the artist must be completely committed to each move he makes with his artwork.