NYAB Event - Tim Bavington "Up In Suze's Room"

Tim Bavington "Up In Suze's Room"

Jack Shainman Gallery

This event has ended.

Taking music as a starting point, Bavington translates chords, notes, guitar necks and solos into visual systems by approximating their equivalents in color and then spraying them with synthetic polymer onto canvas. Here Bavington presents a number of large-scale paintings in vibrant hues of red, fuchsia, orange, green, electric and pale blue, which pulsate like sound on the surface of the canvas. While the exhibition includes vertically striped paintings that are typical to Bavington's oeuvre, it also features a new style of work such as All I Want to Do Is Rock (Fretboard) that displays a grid of larger bands of color. It also includes Cold Fire and Up in Suze's Room, which both exhibit an uninhibited looseness where colors bleed into one another or fade in and out creating open spaces of white light within the composition. Vertical lines stand alone or mix with diagonals or horizontal bands. In some instances hazy, Rothko-like compositions inspired by album covers replace lines altogether. The album covers serve only as initial inspiration for these works that take on a life of their own. In doing this, Bavington unleashes colors intuitively to create paintings that offer harmonious visual impressions rather than simple representations of his source material.

Along with references to popular music such as jazz, Paul Weller, David Bowie, REM and Oasis, Bavington's influences include the desert landscape of the West, neon signage, and color field and optical paintings from the 1960s and 70s. Further, on a more conceptual level, Bavington's works refer to Newton and Goethe's studies of the relationship between sound and color, which continued through the paintings of Kandinsky and the composers of early 20th century Russia. He also deals with contemporary neurological studies of synesthesia--the concept of joined perception or the fusing of separate senses.

Bavington balances a systematic approach with intuitive paint handling, resulting in canvases that dazzle the eye while bridging the gap between the dueling concepts of real vs. synthetic, digital vs. analog and straight symbol vs. coded metaphor.

[Image: Tim Bavington "Up In Suze's Room" (2009) Synthetic polymer on canvas 120 x 96 in.]