Christopher Hanlon

About

Timothy Taylor Gallery is delighted to announce the first in a new series of exhibitions at the gallery under the title The Viewing Room. Timothy Taylor Gallery, in association with Domo Baal, will be showcasing a suite of paintings by Christopher Hanlon, a recent graduate of the Royal College of Art, London. Hanlon's hermetic and tonally low-key paintings appear at first to be fragments of a psychologically charged drama. Typically presented in small installations, Hanlon's apparently heterogeneous arrangements of abstract and figurative paintings slowly combine to convey feelings of disenchantment and longing, without recourse to a unifying or underlying narrative. In Broken Vendor, 2009 and Untitled (Screen 2), 2008, flat fields of subtly modulated colour situated in empty and ambiguous spaces block and frustrate the viewer's gaze. In Hanlon's more Baroque geometrical experiments, a multiplication of folds and attendant shadows confuse the eye, which is further disorientated by unexpected changes in the surface texture and opacity of paint. Themes of masking and obscuring similarly occur in Hanlon's figurative compositions. In The Lull, 2010 the artist's anonymous and mute protagonist averts her eyes, where in other paintings his characters turn their backs towards the viewer altogether. In both his abstract and figurative paintings, Hanlon alludes to the inadequacies and failure of communication and language, whether it be visual, spoken, or expressed in a gesture. Christopher Hanlon was born in 1978 in the UK and currently lives and works in London. He received his MFA from the Royal College of Art in 2008 and was part of Bloomberg New Contemporaries in the same year. Hanlon recently exhibited at the Renaissance Society at University of Chicago (2009), and Domo Baal, London (2009).