"Sombrero"
Opening: 25/05/2004, 7 p.m.
Exhibition will be showing from: 26/05/2004 to 03/07/2004
After waking late, I open the door and step outside, confronted with a wall of white light. I rub my eyes, but this makes my sight even more disorientated, forms appear abstracted, only shadows can be seen. Yet gradually details start to appear, their definitions merge with the surrounding aura – edges become defined as lines against the haze, reality becomes a series of diffused definitions against the sun’.
Tim Stoner, Andalucia, 2004
For Tim Stoner’s new show at Engholm Engelhorn gallery, he has painted the image of a young woman in a hat against the Mediterranean sun. The subject repeated with slight adjustments of angle, light and gesture, which constantly change our perception of the emotional architecture of the scene.
Some of these figures are almost erased of details and descriptions, yet are prominent in others, dissolving into a surface of gestures in a dense plasticity of paint. The shadows within these forms split into a restless spectrum around the image - a metaphor for the universe of sunlit particles between the viewer and subject.
Although appearing flat into the eye, the figure and space dissolve into a singular icon. These are images involved with the speed and delay process of the mind and eye, the moment of recognition held by an image and the pressure that it exerts on our psyche. The experience of seeing several of these pieces together evokes a multiplicity of relationships where the standardisation and repetition creates an Image Déjà vu, where the forms of known things drift in and out of sense.
Tim Stoner (b.1970, England) lives and works in London and Ronda, Spain. He won ‘Becks Futures 2’ at the ICA London in 2001. He previously showed at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau in Amsterdam (2002), and participated in ‘Nation’ at the Frankfurter Kunstverein (2003). His paintings are currently on show in ‘Britannia Works’, a British Council show in Athens, Greece.
