UNTITLED 20070301, 2007
TIM MAGUIRE
oil on canvas
120.0 x 110.0 cm
signed, dated and inscribed verso: Maguire '07 / 20070301
Von Lintel Gallery, New York, United States of America (label attached verso)
Private collection, Sydney
Tim Maguire, Von Lintel Gallery, New York, United States of America, 10 May – 9 June 2007
Tim Maguire is represented by Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
The following excerpts are from Tony Godfrey's essay 'Light, Skin and Beauty' from the 2007 monograph on the artist, Murray Cree, L., (ed.), Tim Maguire, Piper Press, Sydney, 2007
'Maguire's paintings represent several phenomena simultaneously: physical things (flowers, berries, branches) activities (painting, spotting, seeing) and states of mind (calm, pleasure, perturbation). The paintings represent the way things come into being - the world seen not as stasis but as process. And this is why understanding how the paintings are made becomes significant. If we believe with Richard Wollheim1 that when we look at a painting seriously we are trying to replicate the position and actions of the painter, then to understand Maguire's painting is, at least, partly to imaginatively reconstruct his acts: selection and cropping of an image, splitting the image into three layers, then - working from the computer generated guides - the act of painting. First, perhaps, the yellow is applied with easy fluid gestures, then splattered with solvent; next comes the layer of magenta and again the solvent (the splattering done as calmly as the painting); lastly, there is the application of cyan and a final act of splattering.
Maguire's way of working is singular. Acts of touch (brushwork) alternate with acts where he does not directly touch (splattering). Yet tension mounts as the layers build - will the balance of control and chance hold? The process resembles a recording studio where the bass is put down, followed by the melody and finally the voice. But in the recording studio you can go back and recut or dub the bass or melody. Here there is no going back; the yellow and magenta are buried. It can be a neurosis for Maguire that a mistake made in the first stage of laying down yellow is irremediable. One can lose touch with the surface.
There is a sense that these are Apollonian paintings created by Dionysian means: calm attained by struggle. Through time based activities the artist achieves something that feels calm and timeless.'
1. Wollheim, R., Painting as an Art, Thames and Hudson, London, 1987, p. 43