Tropical Industrial – Chris Trueman

Please join us for our 4th solo exhibition with Chris Trueman and help us celebrate the inaugural opening of TWFINEART’s new premises at 22 MASTER ST, NEWSTEAD!

We’ve teamed up with our friends over at Gerard’s Bistro, with their chief mixologist creating two custom cocktails for the evening – ‘tropical’ and ‘industrial’.

We will also have a limited edition run of t-shirts, available for pre-order now – get yours now so it’ll be here in time for Chris to sign on the night! Please contact us for further information.

In Trueman’s newest work he creates paintings that inhabit the space between object and image, between synthetic and natural, between technical and organic. Painting primarily on Yupo, a synthetic paper, whose nonabsorbent surface allows him to remove areas of pigment to paint through additive and subtractive processes he creates complex and difficult to discern spaces in which negative gestural passages expose underlying layers of painted history. The process of removal of paint yields a surface which gives the impression of tactility while paradoxically maintaining little to no texture, the reversed brushstrokes attesting to his hand and evidencing a foregone history while denying the material residue. The paintings at times appear mediated as though through a LCD screen or digital device, yet are rich with depth, light and sheen.

Drawing from a diverse lexicon of mark making including gestural painting, graffiti, colour field and with deftly nuanced colour palette, these paintings speak to a merger between organic and synthetic, and a cultural sensibility which indulges equally in artificial as the natural. By conceptually appropriating formal vocabularies from various painting traditions he creates visual and physical tensions that amplify the material ambiguity and allude to a synthesis of visual language from high art to pop to urban culture.