Gavin Tremlett - The Hobby




Gavin Tremlett, exhibition view Wohnmaschine, 2006


 

November 10, 2006 - January 13, 2007

 

 

Wohnmaschine is pleased to present the first solo exhibition by Gavin Tremlett (b. 1977).

The current series of works by the British painter consists of distressing portraits.

In a style that recalls Italian painting of the late sixteenth century, with distortions that follow in the tradi-tion of Francis Bacon, Tremlett visualizes a physicality that is both highly charged sexually and tends to the uncanny.

 

Tremlett is primarily interested in the process of painting, which he studies using the example of the hu-man body. His full-figure portraits and studies of male and female adolescent bodies are presented against undefined backgrounds. The postures and poses of his sitters are grotesquely overdrawn, and their young faces seem displaced and lost. Despite their mannered nakedness, the figures are not so much the expression of a subtle eroticism; rather, they exude an atmosphere of intimate distress.

 

Tremlett’s style is influenced by historical models like Caravaggio, pornographic photographs of various centuries, and contemporary glossy magazines, to which the exhibition’s title, THE HOBBY, alludes with ironic sarcasm. Using Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro techniques, Tremlett produces paintings of bodies with sculptural effect. They seem to give off light and thus confront the viewer with their immediate presence. His deliberately provocative presentation of his figures locates Tremlett’s paintings between vulgarity and a yearning for figuration.

 

Tremlett’s series of portrait heads—fictive faces, to which he applies countless glazes, deforming them layer by layer, are pointedly antithetical to conventions of beauty and typical ideal faces; he views them as deliberately posed, aesthetic regression.

 

In a way quite contrary to the meticulousness with which Tremlett treats the materiality of his paintings, the design of the backgrounds of the paintings represents the moment of dissolution. Where the bodies seem translucent and immaterial, they are transformed into the planes of abstract painting. At the point of intersection between the body presented and the gaze, the surface of the body and the flatness of painter confront the viewer like a projection screen.