IMAGES: MAXIME BROUILLET
TIM KENT
VAGARIES OF PRECISION
OCTOBER 2 TO NOVEMBER 20, 2021
ARTIST RECEPTION:
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2021
2 P.M. TO 6 P.M.
PATRICK MIKHAIL IN MONTRÉAL PRESENTS “VAGARIES OF PRECISION” AN EXHIBITION OF NEW PAINTINGS BY NEW YORK ARTIST TIM KENT
In Vagaries of Precision, Tim Kent invites us to think about space as an encounter between architecture and air, structure and void—an opportunity to shift between opposing forces and appreciate their dependent relations.
In his first solo exhibition with Patrick Mikhail, Kent has created works in which the architectural content across the paintings addresses the visual culture of traditional power structures, but ones that fade and fragment. This is part of a response to the modernist illusion of transparency, an illusion that informs so much of contemporary culture. The old idea of how power presents itself has transmuted to postmodernism's glass enclosures. Transparency is more evident but it's the lie of hyper-capital markets. As Kent says, "architecture represents order and chaos." It produces structures under the guise of geometric precision and yet always with the inevitable fallibility of human presence.
The voids and erasures in Kent's paintings allow the eye to pause and reset, before plunging into the trigonometric detail and expressionistic brushstrokes that are a hallmark of his work. The conflation of ambiguity and presence offers a space for the viewer's imagination. Kent retains windows, corridors, and disintegrating walls as escape routes for the viewer's gaze from one place to a new space across the canvas. The works invite interpretive themes but interfere with insistent notions.
Kent explores the history of architecture, the theatricality of academic painting, the significance of vector systems, and the role of the figure as a measure in perspective to produce meta-visualizations of how we experience the world today.
This latest body of work responds to the isolation of a pandemic spent working in his Brooklyn-based studio where inspiration came from spaces in his memories— sites visited and experienced in a life that started in Canada and now finds itself returning home for this exhibit with Patrick Mikhail Gallery.