Tim Maguire’s sophisticated works are often cinematic in scale and distinctive for their rich coloration. Stand up close and you see how his luminous works are produced with just three pure colours – yellow, magenta and cyan.
Photosynthesis, Tim Maguire’s latest exhibition at Tolarno Galleries Melbourne presents a series of translucent prints that are visual firecrackers. The title is a reference to energy conversion and natural cycles, and also to Maguire’s interest in light, particularly refracted light expressed as dancing points of pure colour in a fusion of hand painted and photographic imagery.
Images of bare branches and snowflakes falling through a night sky have a transparency yet purity of colour obtained by mixing colours on a computer; yet these prints are also very much hand made and man made: painted gestures, splashes of solvent, accidental interventions - even thumb prints - are all in evidence.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is the monumental Kinglake Panorama (over seven metres in length) based on a montage of photos Maguire took when he travelled to Kinglake in Victoria, a year after devastating bush fires swept through the region.
Taken by both the evidence of the massive force which had laid the landscape to waste, and the energy of the regrowth, Maguire mirrored this destruction and transformative regeneration in his process, whereby an image was pulled apart into its constituent colours, and then remade, transformed. Large scale hand painted films were made, scanned, digitally converted into primary colours and then combined to make one large image which was then printed onto photographic paper in a technique developed at Studio Bordas, Paris.
Tim Maguire has exhibited extensively in Europe and Australia for more than two decades, including a 2008 solo show at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery, UK. For many years he has worked collaboratively with the French master printer, Franck Bordas.
Tim Maguire’s paintings and prints are cinematic in scale and distinctive for their rich colouration and technical skill. Giant flowers and golden fruit resonate from ambiguous backgrounds. The work is sumptuous, romantic. Shaun Lakin argues that Maguire’s painting is ‘both historical and contemporary’. But that these modes ‘do not exactly co-exist …they rub up against each other.’
Tolarno Galleries has been at the cutting edge of contemporary Australian art for many years. Four artists have represented Australia at the Venice Biennale and the exhibition program attracts the attention of collectors, curators and critics from around the globe.
