Tim Wright | Inside the Eye: at ArtMoorHouse

About

This includes eight new, large-scale paintings and works on paper, and a selection of pieces from his two preceding exhibitions: Far-seeing Eye (2019) and Into the Deep (2018).The cavernous gallery at ArtMoorHouse offers an ideal, contemporary Baroque space in which to place the new with its antecedents. Its extensive scale allows a unique opportunity to view this substantial series of paintings and associated drawings.

While Into the Deep offered a series of Baroque frames through which to enter a nebulous world, Far-seeing Eye explored beyond that gateway into a mythical Arcadian location that drew further on motifs inspired by the Baroque master carver, Grinling Gibbons.

The new work is the third stage in that extended journey. Seen here for the first time, these pieces enter more deeply into a dream landscape of heightened imagery that is familiar, but out of joint. There are fragments of scenes or motifs that resist illusion. You are in a world, artificial and strange, where normal rules are suspended.

The works exhibit a contrasting mix of closely-observed motif and gesturally-turbulent passages of rich and subtle colour. Describing both the specific and the general, the artist sets up a personal iconography of significant images, which jump from emphatic focus to veiled suggestion. The combination of forest decor and composition by fragments is unsettling and hints at things hidden from view. This is a mysterious arena of the imagination found beyond the gate and the normal frame of reference. What is one to make of these singular combinations, allusive objects and bits of stories?