Inner Scale with Comparison. By Tom Keogh.
Speaking about the phenomenological reception of his work Henry Moore spoke of how his sculpture
‘... must be set so that it relates to the sky rather than to trees, a house, people, or other aspects of its surroundings. Only the sky, miles away, allows us to contrast infinity with reality, and so we are able to discover the sculptor’s inner scale without comparison’.
Richard T. Walker most emphatically does want to consider the artist’s, and by extension the viewer’s, inner scale with comparison. He acknowledges and confronts our need to relate emotionally to our surroundings and the often false narratives we construct to allow an easy, often lazy way of doing this. He questions and undermines the desires and needs manufactured in us by popular culture. This culture - the devolved child of enlightenment romantic ideals - moulds and distorts our attempts at personal expression, colours our nascent relations and seeks to anthropomorphize the solid stuff of our day to day existence. Just as the film industry has shown us that a room doesn’t just have to be a room but can expand conceptually to become a mise en scene, mirroring the characters’ moods, emotions and actions, so we have all come to understand that the entire world outside ourselves can and indeed must create a mirror for our solipsistic existence. In one of his pieces, using probably the most narrative laden place on our planet – the great American outdoors, depository of saccharine notions of home and freedom –, he examines the very subjective relations formed with this and other environments in our culture over the last 200 years.
The work shown in the exhibition at Galeria Del Angels is part of an ongoing ontological research project by the artist. He combines a Woody Allenesque obsession regarding the complex language of relational psychology with images of breathtakingly beautiful landscapes and bucolic scenes. Art, personal relations, as we try to understand them, and complex (often kitsch) notions of beauty and the sublime merge seamlessly in his work to create thoughtful and affecting ruminations on the fickle nature of the human emotional and cognitive processes. The direct seemingly naive gaze and the presence of the artist himself in many of the pieces allows the viewer a direct connection with these concerns as we stare into the void, not of sublime transcendence, but of the failed connections and broken promises of a world created to help us rediscover our happiness.
There is something uniquely British in the manner in which T. Walker comments on a Paradise lost. It is a unique development of a rich seam of a sublime but also realist landscape tradition. Just as John Constable portrayed a seemingly eternal traditional world being betrayed and destroyed by agrarian reforms at the very moment he painted it, and J.M.W. Turner portrayed landscapes dissolving under the tension of their own representation, so T. Walker revels in the tensions he seeks to expose in his work between what we can see and what we want to see.
The artist is generous in what he puts in front of the viewer, and also has the benefit of a genuine passion and love for the physical world he works with. A unique element of his work is his ability to revitalize our sensual relationship with the places he portrays. His British landscapes could have been freshly painted by the eighteenth century Welsh painter Richard Wilson. The cold snow covered Swedish landscape he shows us in his piece ‘it’s hard to face that open place’ is achingly real as he attempts to play the guitar accompanied by the howling wind around him. And his series of overlapping videos of landscapes in the United States expose and refresh a beauty abused in our eyes by its forced nuptials to a particular brand of U.S.A political values jingoism which has become at best tired and at worst obnoxiously offensive.
A straightforward love of nature glows from all the work. A desire to understand it and extricate it from the complex web of human self interest in which it becomes entangled unifies the pieces into an impressive body of work. There is a pithiness about many of the pieces that disallow any false reading of their aesthetic qualities. T. Walker is involved with an artistic project that reveals just how difficult the notion of disinterestedness is, now that the culture we live in has raised the stakes on our claim to a share in the signification of the physical world around each one of us.
Tom Keogh
