The Pleasures of Erasure
It is the blackest black which holds all colours. Tyra Tingleff knows this and her paintings insistently show it to be the case. There is a great difference between saying and showing: ‘to say’ might be taken as analogous to the discrete painterly mark; ‘to show’ then would couple with the stain, or indelible trace. Each carries its own information – however, when encountering the style of delivery associated with the former, one might be said ‘to see’, whereas, with the latter, something is sensed as much as tangibly felt. Tingleff is interested in a moment when language ceases and another mode of communication begins and carries its own time signature and bodily engagement with image and space.
This is only the first of a long chain of paired terms that structure Tingleff’s practice of painting. Her paintings are novelistic rather than literary, episodic rather than narrative. One enters into each painting in a manner similar to how they are made: like the way one, when indeed lucky, merges – bodily – with music rather than listening to song. Tyra Tingleff’s paintings are ideally to be sensed as much as to be seen. She operates through a dynamic rhythm of construction and deconstruction, moving through the workings of a painting both in and between complex layers of colour. Out of these acts emerge the hidden duplicate of the visible, or perhaps the visible duplicate of that which is hidden. There are moments when Tingleff’s paintings – and here, I mean colour as much as anything else – appear to hover as a substance floating free of its support. Trace is an important value in her work and carries as much import as the manner in which time is organized as a material process in Tingleff’s practice.
Painterly marks are often approached as either additive or subtractive. Erasure, veiling and working to reveal the haunted archaeology of each layer are amongst her painterly pleasures. The beauty of Tyra Tingleff’s painting achieves its maximum effect when it arrives, finally at the harbour of its minimal extreme: then, all that is precise and concrete disintegrates only to coalesce as a presence felt, all the more strongly, by being left unsaid.
John Slyce, London, 2013
Tyra Tingleff (b. Norway 1984, lives and works in London) studied at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen; The National Academy of the Arts in Bergen, Norway; and The Royal College of Art, London. Recent exhibitions include ‘Det som er, og det som kunne være’, BKS Garage, Copenhagen, 2013; Bloomberg New Contemporaries, ICA, London, 2012; Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Liverpool Biennale, England, 2012.
Please contact us for further information about the exhibition.
03.05 – 02.06.2013 Opening Friday 03 May at 5 – 8 pm.
Opening hours Saturday 12 noon – 4 pm, Sunday 12 noon – 3 pm and by appointment.
peinture et sculpture
Admiral Gjeddes Gaard
Store Kannikestræde 10
1169 Copenhagen K