The second in the series of Albemarle Shows, established London artist Tim Wright exhibits his new works at Coningsby Gallery (30 Tottenham St, Fitzrovia, London W1T 4RJ) from April 28 - 11 May 2019.
Wright's exploration of ‘modern-day Baroque’ and the tension between observed reality and painterly abstraction continues, as he manipulates closely-observed motifs in a sea of turbulent paint.
In this series of paintings, framing devices — wreaths, garlands and variegated assemblages of classical, baroque and rococo models — lead the viewer into deep vistas of allusive paint. Turbid workings, marks and gestures combine with films, skins and veils of sumptuous colour to make a seductive and dynamic surface, into which the figurative elements are integrated. Glazes, pools and accretions play across the picture plane, making reference to the mist, spray and vapour of landscape and atmosphere, suggestive of a space beyond.
The symbolic significance of the imagery is of gateways and openings. The compositions imply a threshold where the focussing power of the motif conjures the appearance of new, transmuted perspectives. There is a ‘through-the-looking-glass’ feel to this sequence of paintings, something other-worldly, that draws out various, tangential associations from science-fiction, mythology and the elemental imaginings of Turner’s ‘sublime’ landscapes.
The pictures are contemporary articulations of antique models. Such florid and abundant imagery expresses an aesthetic of sensuous complexity. This corresponds to today’s ‘meta-culture’ of worked-up appetites, fusions, cross-overs and mash-ups. This is the world, for example, of Marvel cinematic superheroes or ‘Game of Thrones’, in which saturation and plenitude is all and hyper-stimulation the norm. Tim Wright’s paintings propose a dream space of cascading variety, where limitless mutability and change is always an exciting possibility.
