Sim Smith is proud to present Horatiu Boldor, Tim Garwood’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.
The exhibition is an exploration of gestural abstraction on Garwood’s terms. His relentless curiosity spans a rich and diverse practice that explores a colourful and vigorously gestural world of paint and a love of objects acquired from outside of his studios, resulting in multiple mediums of choice.
The paintings in this exhibition are intense, a result of a succession of real-time decisions. Risky and impulsive, spatially complex and spontaneously composed, at times Garwood purposefully relinquishes control, foregoing the trappings of the composition of a painting. He paints on panes of glass, back to front, upside down. The results are spellbinding; dangerous and beautiful, polished and slick. He also paints on sack cloth and tablecloths with grid like patterns that warp and wiggle, with great globules of paint heftily spattered on the plane. Neon tubes spark, fizz and shine against these surfaces with cables that drape like heavy tendrils in a forest. The neon lights create further reflections like pools or portals to other worlds in the glass paintings and illuminate parts of the paintings on tablecloth and sacking like a magnifying glass.
His studio is part-science lab, part-chandlery, part-foragers hut – busy, vital and vibrant. Garwood has always gleamed materials from outside of his studios, repurposing objects and elements from the city streets and rural landscapes. Working in painting and installation, the physical elements of his practice - from burnt wood, glass, tablecloths and rusty nails to sackcloth, dried poppy heads, and neon tubes—are as symbolically evocative as they are vast-ranging.
He records both intentional and unintentional gestures, combining the meticulous study of his materials with improvisation. Highly pigmented oils sit on top of the delicate patinas of diluted inks; free, floating and cloud-like. Diverse applications of colour; heavy, light, dense and translucent, cluster in empty surroundings. Garwood pushes each painting to succeed, not knowing its real fate until the end. He trusts his familiarity with his materials but constantly teeters on the edge of the pictorial plane descending into chaos. When the paintings work, they work and then suddenly their conclusion seems inevitable. He is dealing with destiny and magic. There is a sense of continuum between the works which transcends the numerous materials used as they become pieces of a larger constellation.
The impressions of Garwood’s work constantly evolve, with nothing settling into certainty. They are surprising, vital and project the potential for an enhanced sense of feeling, meaning and belonging. Combining his visual representation of a place in time through abstract forms, Garwood leaves us with a feeling of vivid recollection. The paintings are a sensory experience that trigger a rush of memories often long past, or seemingly forgotten; scents, sounds and feelings. He time travels, back and forth through realms of paint and material investigation, holding up mirrors to inner and outer worlds. He explores the intangibility of our thoughts and unconscious bodies; our connections to the earth and the cycles of the stars.
