'The images are neither abstract nor figurative. Depending on how you look at the images, they are not kitsch imaginary vistas or formal colour studies exploring different theories from a painter’s rulebook.
The most visually impressive canvases do not demonstrate the effectiveness of the simplest of painting theories: that a colour’s intensity varies depending on what frames it or surrounds it; light is only light when offset by dark, and vice versa.
So what to make of these images, which appear to riff on the ‘death of painting’ debate – where do we find Timewriter's signature wit and droll take on pop culture? The first clue is his reductive emotions (angry, puzzled, etc): the result being that a story or dialogue takes place between the background colour and the mood expressed. The colour combinations are not complex and there are no emoticons to tell us how we should feel. The absence of a story is made alarming by the scale and intensity of the encounter without much colour on canvas. How far are our moods, our emotions, projected or simplified by our worlds, by pop culture in particular, Timewriter asks, and what happens to our identities when you take that away?
Contemplating the connected metaphors for Art and prostitution, one begins to see the images in a different light. These hypnotic vistas present aggressively anti-slick vacuity, are perhaps not visions of our possible suicides, but visions of our actual digitally mediated suicides. The delivery of the concept feels messy, and perhaps that’s the point: in a world where the pixel is king, pop culture has lost its punch. It is all very wry and very clever.'
This article was first published in the December 2013 issue of Imaginary Art Review
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