The Water In The Well

JGM GALLERY IS DELIGHTED TO PRESENT THE WATER IN THE WELL AN EXHIBITION OF WORKS ON CANVAS BY TIM ALLEN, PRODUCED OVER THE LAST DECADE. THE PAINTINGS IN THIS EXHIBITION ARE ARCHETYPAL WORKS BY ALLEN IN THAT THEY ARE VAST AND MESMERIC, STRADDLING THE BORDER BETWEEN ABSTRACTION AND REPRESENTATION.

WHAT SIGNIFIES A NOVEL APPROACH BY THE ARTIST IS THE ADDED EMPHASIS ON TRANSIENCE AND IMPERMANENCE. THIS IS CONVEYED, PRIMARILY, WITH THE USE OF A GRAINER’S BRUSH. THE PARALLEL MARKINGS ACHIEVED WITH THIS TOOL HAVE PREVIOUSLY BEEN USED BY ALLEN TO RENDER A VARIETY OF ATMOSPHERIC EFFECTS: BACON-ESQUE CURTAINS, RIPPLING AIR, REFLECTIVE SURFACES BETWEEN THE VIEWER AND A HORIZON. IN THE WATER IN THE WELL, ALLEN USES THEM TO ESTABLISH ROUNDED APERTURES.

THERE ARE MANY ASSOCIATIONS THAT ONE MIGHT DRAW BETWEEN THESE AND A CLOCK, OR THE ORBIT OF A GLOBE, BUT IT IS THE BRUSHSTROKES THEMSELVES THAT MOST CONVEYS THIS FEELING OF TRANSIENCE AND THE PASSAGE OF TIME. UNLIKE THE REDUCED LANDSCAPE BENEATH, THESE OPENINGS ARE PAINTED IN A WAY THAT EXPOSES THEIR TECHNICAL ARCHITECTURE. AS ALLEN’S BRUSH RUNS OUT OF PAINT, HE CONTINUES TO DRAG IT, CONSPICUOUSLY INDICATING WHERE EACH MARK BEGINS AND ENDS. THAT IS, A CHRONOLOGY OF MOVEMENT AND ACTION IS ESTABLISHED.

IF THE VIEWER IS MADE AWARE OF TIME AND IMPERMANENCE BY THESE SPIRALS, THEN RECTANGLES - USUALLY ESTABLISHED WITH A HORIZONTAL LINE CUTTING THROUGH THE CANVAS - SUGGESTS SOMETHING MORE SPATIAL. THERE IS ALSO A SOLIDITY TO THESE RECTANGULAR AREAS, WHICH CLARIFIES THE COMPOSITIONAL ARRANGEMENT. WITH THESE TWO SHAPES - RECTANGLES AND CIRCLES - ALLEN GENERATES AN AESTHETIC AND CONCEPTUAL TENSION, MASTERFULLY DEMONSTRATING HIS COMPOSITIONAL INSTINCTS.

ON THE OCCASION OF THE EXHIBITION, MATTHEW COLLINGS WROTE AN ESSAY ON ALLEN’S WORK. THE ARTIST ALSO SAT DOWN FOR AN ‘IN CONVERSATION’ WITH JULIUS KILLERBY.

WHAT IS THIS STRANGE RELIGION?

AN EXAMINATION OF TIM ALLEN’S WORK BY MATTHEW COLLINGS.

MATTHEW COLLINGS IS AN ART CRITIC, WRITER, BROADCASTER & ARTIST. HE HAS PREVIOUSLY WRITTEN AND PRESENTED CHANNEL 4’S THIS IS CIVILISATION AND BBC’S RENAISSANCE REVOLUTION. SINCE 2015 HE HAS BEEN A REGULAR ART CRITIC FOR THE EVENING STANDARD.

THESE PAINTINGS are about what they are made of — openings, illusions, circles, lines, horizons, streaks, solid flatness, breaks, continuities. The nature of the illusion is rushing movement, down a hole, through an opening, a cosmic distance, a snapping-to. We go towards ecstasy. We’re transported. If the works are about light and looking, perceptual psychology, visual intelligence, curiosity about looking, they put all this into a certain framework. It is the realm of Big Paintings.

Big and broad, like from long ago, the 1960s and 70s continuing the 1950s. But with a postmodern feel because of the contradiction in each of the paintings between brushy openness and a carefully bounded hard edge. As if a language game is being played. Is it a mere game? The paintings are deep even if they have this device, the use of which could be mistaken for shallowness or a trick or glib. It’s a device yes. But only like masking tape in paintings by Barnett Newman is a device.

Newman said the one great thing of all the many recorded sayings of the Abstract Expressionist painters: “Aesthetics is for artists as ornithology is for the birds.” It’s witty because of the double meaning of “for the birds” (the American idiomatic phrase meant useless, meaningless or only believed by the gullible). And it’s a deep idea, it communicates an important notion about art being an independent mode of knowledge, independent even of the knowledge-system that began to be constructed in the late eighteenth century to explain it.

In our time, no one expects or wants artists to be deep, although we pretend we do. We really want them to be cute and say cute things. Whether they are young or old, they should have the manners — we think — to only say things that anyone not intellectually developed can easily get. Tim’s paintings seem to me to be a playful participant in our own funny and shallow conversations, and at the same time, continuous with the seriousness of the art of the past. With our own seriousness, which we still have somewhere.

Another artist his recent paintings remind me of, is the sculptor Lee Bontecou. Her abstract canvas and metal constructions of the early 60s came out from the wall several feet and presented a black hole, an opening into a void. Sinister, mesmerising, beautiful. If you went through, you’d go into infinity. It was like any black circle in international abstract art, from Kandinsky to Victor Pasmore, but exaggerated and hyperbolised. Maybe a progenitor of Anish Kapoor’s black-void illusions. Anish’s are industrial finish hi tech objects, while Lee’s were industrial-referring but obviously Art. They were deeply “made” objects. You could see everything and feel your way through all the stages. The same with Tim’s streaks and flows, and the maskings and overlays, all his painterly engineering.

He recently titled some paintings after lyrics on Iggy Pop’s American Caesar (it came out exactly thirty years ago). I recognised them immediately and loved their rightness for the mood of Tim’s whole body of work. They make me laugh with delight again looking at his latest pictures. The track, Caesar, is so magnificent and funny. It tells the listener all about movies featuring the Romans when Iggy was young (the Romans in movies always had a soundtrack in a minor key). But it also tells the listener about a new real magnificence. Not just an old camp one. And the two are clearly different as concepts, one silly, one moving, but they are joined in Iggy’s song, and can’t be separated. Just as with Spartacus and Ben Hur there can be an unexpected emotional impact, along with all the absurdity of the scripts.

The Romans is surely also Jesus. And since the “fiery pit” is in Iggy’s narrative (“Throw him in the fiery pit!”) then The Romans is also the Old Testament. Among the earliest known Christian artworks, catacomb graffiti, is a picture of the scene in the Book of Daniel, of Hebrew youths cast into a fiery furnace by Nebuchadnezzar because they refuse to worship a golden idol. The Old Testament appears in Christian Art because the scenes in the New Testament are fulfillments of prophecy. Religion is considered to be for the birds. But all Art comes from it.

Fundamentalist distortions of religion distort our sense of its power as poetry and philosophy. Religion isn’t malignant. We’re all going to die any day now from eco catastrophe, if not before that, from World War III. And both threats came not from religion but from the neoliberal inheritors of the Enlightenment. The vast majority of religious people in the world now, get beauty, spirituality, morality and kindness from it. This magnificent invention.

Tim is funny like Iggy about magnificence. Funny and real. He paints to make you look. Not to prove an academic point from the colour and design class. But so you can be transported by looking.