Tom Chamberlain
30 Apr - 20 Aug 2011
© Tom Chamberlain
And Another Thing, 2011
Acrylic on canvas
90 x 97 cm
36 3/5 x 39 2/5 in.
Photo: Wiley Hoard
And Another Thing, 2011
Acrylic on canvas
90 x 97 cm
36 3/5 x 39 2/5 in.
Photo: Wiley Hoard
TOM CHAMBERLAIN
Some Other Time
30 April - 20 August, 2011
The British artist Tom Chamberlain (*1973) engages the simplest of artistic means to achieve an unusually high degree of visual complexity and his conceptual aim of intricate mark-making that brings about its own erasure.
His paintings comprise multiple layers of thinly applied acrylic, while his drawings comprise innumerable evenly spaced points or lines. At first glance, a white piece of drawing paper belies the hundreds of threadlike lines that weave their way across the paper. Simple lines and primary colors interlock in a filigree field of complex iridescent color and movement that the beholder’s eye struggles to perceive. What appears monochrome shimmers delicately, revealing depth and substance while evading definite form.
His works take their time, allowing the viewer to experience the emergence of form. There is a visual reticence that hopes to slow down perception to arrive in the present, as various seeming colors and depths arrange and rearrange themselves on the surface. Although elements of pattern are present, there is nothing for the eye to grasp; the threat of entropy is ever present. Similarly, he does not attempt to define the colors of things because he wants them to possess an unnamable quality: the idea of grey, a color in limbo, defies anything conclusive.
Occasionally his work seems to be a passage from dark to light, as if a painting would illuminate itself. Other times it accumulates layers of color that eventually cancel themselves out into blankness or become a kind of screen on which vision can be projected, without offering clues to what belongs within the surface. Visually, it is the imminence of something not yet here—or already gone.
Some Other Time
30 April - 20 August, 2011
The British artist Tom Chamberlain (*1973) engages the simplest of artistic means to achieve an unusually high degree of visual complexity and his conceptual aim of intricate mark-making that brings about its own erasure.
His paintings comprise multiple layers of thinly applied acrylic, while his drawings comprise innumerable evenly spaced points or lines. At first glance, a white piece of drawing paper belies the hundreds of threadlike lines that weave their way across the paper. Simple lines and primary colors interlock in a filigree field of complex iridescent color and movement that the beholder’s eye struggles to perceive. What appears monochrome shimmers delicately, revealing depth and substance while evading definite form.
His works take their time, allowing the viewer to experience the emergence of form. There is a visual reticence that hopes to slow down perception to arrive in the present, as various seeming colors and depths arrange and rearrange themselves on the surface. Although elements of pattern are present, there is nothing for the eye to grasp; the threat of entropy is ever present. Similarly, he does not attempt to define the colors of things because he wants them to possess an unnamable quality: the idea of grey, a color in limbo, defies anything conclusive.
Occasionally his work seems to be a passage from dark to light, as if a painting would illuminate itself. Other times it accumulates layers of color that eventually cancel themselves out into blankness or become a kind of screen on which vision can be projected, without offering clues to what belongs within the surface. Visually, it is the imminence of something not yet here—or already gone.