Deutscher and Hackett

The following extracts are from Tony Godfrey's essay in the recently published monograph on Tim Maguire:

'There is a very real sense in which the disparities between perfect surface and immaculate representation in Maguire's later paintings, and the spots, brush-marks and periodic mismatches of registration, likewise undercut but intensify the beauty of the painting as it is perceived by the viewer. There is no blood in Tim Maguire's paintings; they do not have the intense, tragic world view of Béla Baláz's libretto. But there is the constant revealing of a chasm, a fissure in this world, followed by a pulling back from the edge. A viewer's first reaction, especially with the flower paintings, is to their beauty. Yet each spot undercuts the response; their progressive discovery requiring the viewer to work ever harder to maintain these paintings as an experience of sheer effulgent beauty.'¹

The goal for the contemporary painter today is to make work that is simultaneously embedded in the tradition of painting, while engaging with the contemporary world. This Tim Maguire does. His light is unique in that while seeming so contemporary, so scientific, it draws on and deploys the whole range of light - and our responses to it - in Western art. His is, with all its paradoxes, a major contribution to the phenomenology and philosophy of light. His surfaces embody for the viewer a complex attitude to the skin of the world, our love of it and sometimes revulsion at it. Maguire's work is a signal contribution to the difficult discussion about beauty that preoccupies contemporary painting. He provides a rich and varied narrative, creating paintings that touch a notion of perfection.²

1. Godfrey T., 'Light, Skin and Beauty', in Murray Cree, L., (ed.), Tim Maguire, Piper Press, Sydney, 2007, p. 26
2. ibid. p. 28