Keith Talent presents
‘Man and Space’
New paintings by Tim Parr
May 15th-June 22nd
Man has always been fascinated by space and the unknown. Parr’s most recent paintings focus around constructing visual space where figures reach, climb, and contort, building towards the indefinite.
Parr’s unique magical realist style can relate back to Victorian English artist, Richard Dadd, who created highly detailed paintings of fairies and the supernatural worlds. Dadd’s mystical works heavily relied on imagination and vision. Like Dadd, Parr creates tranquil yet unsettling worlds blurring the lines of the natural environment and fantasy. His ambiguous narratives are dream like- where something which seems familiar becomes disconnected.
Memory and history inform Parr’s work as is evident in through the influence of Italian master painters. Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel shaped Parr’s fascination with built environments where figures create the pictorial space. Similarly, Parr applies a contemporary take on Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro method of using a darker palette juxtaposed with bright contrasting highlights. This technique emphasizes religious undertones through an intense yet vague light source hitting an outstretched arm reaching out or light washing over a body stretching over wooden boards in the shape of a cross. Parr combines the Renaissance ideas of idyllic human forms with a Baroque exaggeration of movement.
Parr works with life models to render his bodies. Using his partner to inspire many of his figures, Parr crafts within the classical artist and muse mode of making. In mythology muses were mysterious nymphs, almost super human creatures, who inspired artistic creation. This mythical notion adhere Parr’s use of imagination and fantasy to assemble narratives.
A departure from his earlier ethereal environments, Parr imposes his figures on a dark background creating curious compositions where figures construct the depth and dynamism of the space. Parr’s figures organically fold into one another using their forms to generate architecture and patterning in each painting ever blending artifice and reality.
Tim Parr is a London based artist and presents his first solo show at Keith Talent, London. He has recently had solo exhibitions at Sartorial Contemporary, London (2007) and Galeria Thomas Cohn, San Paulo (2006)
Fantasy Construction is on loan, with thanks, from a private US collection.
1. What is/are the primary reason(s) for you to make work in the first place?
It has now become habit. The older I get, the closer my work comes to that which I always imagined I would be capable. In that respect the daily practice of painting is becoming more and more rewarding and challenging.
2. What do you intend your work to convey to an audience?
I never intend anything specific, that’s not how I work. My paintings can hopefully trigger certain emotions.
3. Why do you work in your chosen medium and format?
It’s rich history. It’s illusory magic.
4. Technically speaking how do you go about constructing your work, that is the image or object itself? What devices do you employ?
I work with life models firstly. Then I use my computer as a way of drawing or imagining, before producing the final painting.
5. Which period(s)/artists/specific works of art are you influenced by and how directly? How does this manifest in your work?
The one work that I return to time and again is Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel, Padova.
6. What stimulates/informs your work from the world around you?
I find the organic nature of the built environment constantly inspiring.
7. What stimulates/informs your work from your own personal experience?
The Scrovegni Chapel made me a painter. Memories of it fuel my daily practice of painting. All daily experience eventually filters through to my artwork I’m sure.
8. From where do you derive your other visual source material (i.e. non art historical) and how do you implement this material within your work?
I enjoy walking through the city of London. I enjoy its ever-changing nature. The ideas of building, construction and renewal, and artifice are central to my work.
9. What are the main problems that you face in making your work?
I think of honesty. Of not holding back.
10. Where do you intend to take your work from here?
I don’t know, and that’s as it should be.
Interview with the artist, 2007
Tim Parr's extraordinary, hyper-real paintings combine beautifully observed details from the natural world with fantastic events. Parr's dreamy reveries draw upon mythological characters, to which our responses swing between delight and horror. Parr's imaginary species vary from Lilliputian humans who seem to be escapees from Gulliver's travels to fairies, witches, Cyclopses and rabid snakes. Often set at night, in semi-rural, semi-urban settings like Hampstead Heath, Parr creates an alarming atmosphere in which imagination reigns, and the rule of reason is suspended. His scenarios recall the author Jorge Luis Borges's classification of animal life, allegedly quoted from an antique Chinese encyclopaedia, where: "animals are divided into being (a) those belonging to the Emporer; (b) embalmed ones; (c) tame ones; (d) sucking pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those included in the present classification (i) those that tremble as if mad."
Alistair Robinson
Curator
Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, 2005
Tim Parr’s 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 clearly what we experience at first glance from Tim Parr's works. The painter steps aside from our world, not concerned with meeting any facet of it, and leaves us perplexed and alone.
Parr takes with him a magnifying lens, and follows 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 (only in "World" these humanlike insects are flying 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