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9/5/2007

Tim Parr

Sartorial Contemporary Art, London

New Work

Sartorial Contemporary Art is pleased to announce Tim Parr's first solo show in London. His new paintings show extraordinary worlds where naked men and women, butterflies and other insects combine to create new myths.

It is all about dreams. This is what we experience, clearly at first glance, from Tim Parr's works. The painter steps aside our world, not worried in meeting any facet of it, and leaves us perplexed and alone. Parr takes with him a magnifying lens, following in various stages the numb lives of tiny human beings that we should better call humanlike insects. These creatures are unconscious protagonists of the painter's unconscious dreams: they are captured with the brush while sleeping in wrapped leaves, being dropped away by rain, partaking of a meal in a beehive, flying with butterfly wings in a speculum mundi sphere, engaging in a chain to reach an uncertain point in the gloominess, like ants in a night trail.

We are not allowed to see their faces, thus we do not understand whether they are struggling for life or just playing like characters on a stage. The feeling of abstraction is enhanced by a close up view that leaves marginal space to the background (except in "World" where the humanlike insects fly in a deep panorama, yet still an enclosed little world). This lack of emotional drive makes us question what it is all about, rather than leaving us unresponsive, and this is the artist's skill. We cannot restrain ourselves in marvelling at what is his reckless chase.

In the very last paintings ("Arch, "Window"), the actions are made even more sublime. The stage for the bodies is the void, and any bonds with reality fade away despite the plasticity of the portrayed beings becoming more stressed. The technique he uses - one-hair brush crystallizing all the figures - is that of the old Flemish painters and the primitive Italians with an appeal to Hieronymus Bosch's themes.

These dreams have nothing deceitful; no hidden, complicated and insincere boasting, they are as they appear.
Francesco Quaglia 2007

An email interview with Tim Parr
Q: What do you think about when you paint?
TP: Pretty much everything, but usually about the next piece of work I'm going to start.
Q: What was the first artwork you saw that made you really excited?
TP: Giotto's frescoes in the Cappella degli Scrovegni, Padua . I was around 9 or 10, and it was the first time an artwork had moved me. The frescoes were immediately accessible to a ten year old - some of the characters looked like people I knew, their situations made all the more real and everyday. I think the thing that impressed me most of all then though, was that a work on such a huge scale could feel so intimate.
Q: Describe your new paintings in one sentence.
TP: Figures trying to get somewhere, or build something .
Q: Who is your favourite writer?
TP: I don't have one. The last book I read was by Kobo Abe "The Woman in the Dunes", claustrophobic and darkly erotic.
Q: How would you like to be remembered?
TP: I'd like to paint something worth remembering.
Tim Parr graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2002 and has exhibited at Thomas Cohn Gallery in Sao Paulo, as well in numerous group shows in the UK at galleries including Rockwell, London and The Biscuit Factory, Newcastle.

Image: Tower 2007, Oil on canvas 22 x 14.5cm

Private View Thursday 10 th May 6:30 - 9pm

Sartorial Contemporary Art
101A Kensington Church St, London W8 7LN
Open Tues-Sat 1:30-6:30pm. or by appointment

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