Man has always been fascinated by space and the unknown. Parr’s most recent paintings focus around constructing visual space where figures reach, climb, and contort, building towards the indefinite.
Parr’s unique magical realist style can relate back to Victorian English artist, Richard Dadd, who created highly detailed paintings of fairies and the supernatural worlds. Dadd’s mystical works heavily relied on imagination and vision. Like Dadd, Parr creates tranquil yet unsettling worlds blurring the lines of the natural environment and fantasy. His ambiguous narratives are dream like- where something which seems familiar becomes disconnected.
Memory and history inform Parr’s work as is evident in through the influence of Italian master painters. Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel shaped Parr’s fascination with built environments where figures create the pictorial space. Similarly, Parr applies a contemporary take on Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro method of using a darker palette juxtaposed with bright contrasting highlights. This technique emphasizes religious undertones through an intense yet vague light source hitting an outstretched arm reaching out or light washing over a body stretching over wooden boards in the shape of a cross. Parr combines the Renaissance ideas of idyllic human forms with a Baroque exaggeration of movement.
Parr works with life models to render his bodies. Using his partner to inspire many of his figures, Parr crafts within the classical artist and muse mode of making. In mythology muses were mysterious nymphs, almost super human creatures, who inspired artistic creation. This mythical notion adhere Parr’s use of imagination and fantasy to assemble narratives.
A departure from his earlier ethereal environments, Parr imposes his figures on a dark background creating curious compositions where figures construct the depth and dynamism of the space. Parr’s figures organically fold into one another using their forms to generate architecture and patterning in each painting ever blending artifice and reality.
Tim Parr is a London based artist and presents his first solo show at Keith Talent, London. He has recently had solo exhibitions at Sartorial Contemporary, London (2007) and Galeria Thomas Cohn, San Paulo (2006).
Construction is on loan, with thanks, from a private US collection.
