FALLING FAINTLY
The final paragraph of The Dead, the short story by James Joyce, and hence the last of the collection in which it sits, Dubliners, concludes with writing of aching poignancy. The sentences touch on the thoughts of the narrative’s main character Gabriel as he watches falling snow from the window of his hotel room. While caught in this moment he reflects on his wife Gretta’s recollection earlier that evening of her childhood love, prompted by conversation during a dinner party. It is an evocative passage visualised with quiet understatement by John Huston in, equally movingly, his last film.
The power of the writing lies in its depiction of Gabriel in muted contemplation; his numbness and recognition of his own emotional limitations metaphorically echoed by the blanket of snow
come to smother the earth. Through this suggestion one comes to understand that it is our lived experience in all its vitality and complexity which sits so inevitably between death and the dead. That this passage in the tale is situated during nighttime after the evening’s splendour of food, wine and friends called together, is even more telling as an evocation of place, time and people caught between the vibrancy of one day and the next. Between the all-pervading darkness suggested internally for Gabriel and its tangible reality of the snow falling on land, so it conjures an actual and mental space,
of a life to be lived held without colour and light. And it is this story that came to mind when thinking about
the recent work of Tim Maguire, in particular his most recent large- scale digital prints of flowers, but even more so those series dedicated to blizzards and water. Not that this work is quite so somber but rather they seem to share a number of characteristics reminiscent of those ideas put forward by Joyce, these qualities pictured and given form by Maguire.
Much has been written already about the artist’s actual process in both painting and printmaking; that of using separations akin to a commercial printing process, overlaying magenta, cyan and yellow to create plays between surface and the illusion of pictorial space as a means to create a degree of abstraction within the image. It is through this method that the colours achieved are almost psychedelic in their intensity, recalling a vibrancy that one might argue is at odds with the pictured representation – especially snowflakes and ripples on water - all fleeting items that are frozen in time, ephemeral yet now forever.
The scale of the prints too is something to contend with, importantly no longer tied to a simple 1:1 ratio but produced whereby they operate within the canon of Modernist painting, an immersive environment in which we are encompassed, set free to contemplate the subject central to Maguire’s artistic proposition.
Works nominally picturing softly falling snow are composites of a number of images found on the internet, the resultant final
ESSAY
piece thus lacking the artifice of a completely imagined scene. Seen here the white flakes are at once of the surface of the print yet recede into its distance – the darkness of the computer screen that is its origin and the void which we must contemplate - and operate as a random pattern across the picture’s surface. Through the mechanism of layering the differing images, halos of colour emerge surrounding pale blobs, far from mere technical mis-registers in the printing, rather the actual mismatch between points of light. In some ways the pinks and turquoises made apparent through the process itself is clearly a step removed from the anticipated black and white monochrome given the notional subject.
Yet these are connected to the earlier prints of flowers in other ways too. The petals of the poppies hold light, retaining their translucency – a quality seen at its most extreme in the recent works. Here Maguire begins by filming water whereby the play of light on the surface becomes the actual means to achieve colour from a transparent medium – literally by assigning magenta, yellow or cyan to one each of three individual stills. Created by taking a sequence of images momentarily seconds apart, this break in time becomes the space occupied by colour or rather the space allowing colour to emerge. Light is temporarily captured as it is refracted through the undulations in water or moves through the delicate flakes of snow. The essence of time becomes something provisionally fixed; the flickering considered a state separating the vibrancy of one moment from the next, from one realm to another.
And so it is into these images that we fall faintly in consideration of our fragile place in the here and now, our last journey.
NIGEL PRINCE
Executive Director, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver
First published in 2018 by Maitland Regional Art Gallery (MRAG) PO Box 220, Maitland NSW 2320 mrag.org.au to accompany the exhibition Tim Maguire: a survey of prints and video 2003-2018
Exhibition dates 10 November 2018 – 27 January 2019
© Maitland Regional Art Gallery All images copyright of the artist Proudly printed in Australia
Tim Maguire is represented by Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
Maitland Regional Art Gallery is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW
