Richard Tinkler “Large Paintings”
“I would almost like to say that in every poem chaos must shimmer through the regular veil of orderliness.”
- Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen (1802)
In every painting by Richard Tinkler, irregular strands of color weave holographic abstractions. Now in a larger format, the paintings pulse vitally with ordered chaos.
They are fuzzy by design: out of focus as images and covered by blurred surfaces of skittering paint as rectangular objects. A geometric pattern and palette are the origin for each painting, and then the successive process of creation, entropy, and incidental mixing yield magic.
There is a sense of seeing and seeing through these paintings. Further away, you can imagine them as organic, asymmetric tiles folding into greater virtual skins. Closer, and the painting’s final layer of small, regular brush strokes takes up your field of vision. Your eyes will see more than a camera can. The painting will see more than your eyes can. The intimacy of intelligent accidents. From any distance, spectral patterns emanate amid a fog organized for light to pass through.
Like a gem, light bends around in the paintings, casting chromatic volumes beyond. They are fortified and yet translucent carrying cases for jeweled portals. They are complete captures of an experimental accumulation of paint. They are projectors of and reliquaries for light.
- Max Levin
“His hand was on a tree trunk. Twig shadows webbed his forearm, the back of his hand, the bark. The figures neared; the web slid. The figures passed; the web slid off. They were, he realized, as eye-unsettling as pictures on a three-dimensional postcard—with the same striations hanging, like a screen, just before, or was it just behind them.”
- Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren (1974)
Press release and images via 56 Henry Gallery, NYC.
