Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to announce New Paintings, Tim Bavington’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. With this exhibition, Bavington continues to translate music into exuberant patterns and color fields that emote a vibrancy and electricity through the precisely painted synthetic polymer atop canvas. Each piece is an evocation of a song’s bridge, melody, a section of notes, systematically reinterpreted for the eye resulting in a vivid synesthesia of the senses.
Marking a new direction in Bavington’s oeuvre, Quadrophenia moves the more classical and strictly vertical and horizontal lines into an intense swirl of brilliant blues, magentas, greens and yellows. Bavington creates a visceral and emotional reverberation using The Who’s operatic album as a departure point and what results is an almost hypnotic optical experience that references the four-point structure of quadraphonic audio.
The overlapping influences of music and art in Bavington’s work results in energetic canvases which connect compositional concepts between supposedly disparate disciplines while allowing for the influences of color field and optical painting from the 1960’s and 1970’s to peek through. The structured, defined lines suggest a strict approach, but simultaneously Bavington’s work signifies a looseness and freedom which emanate from the music he chooses as the work’s core inspiration. David Hickey writes, “Their renewal, refurbishment, and re-conceptualization of a traditional modernist painting format (the stripe), makes them seem at once joltingly new and unceasingly familiar”. His systemic approach which designates sound to color is not a literal translation but a masterfully intuitive one.