Gallery A: Padraig Timoney “Museum Metropolitan” 

Opening: Friday  30 march from 19,30 to 21,30  from 30 march to 3 may 2007 – From Tuesday to Friday from 11,00 to 13,30 from 15,00 to 18,30

The visualization of an image and the technical characteristics used for its reproduction surely are fundamental aspects of the artistic research. Historically, this aspect has been held in consideration by artists in various historical ages and to the expressive possibilities that technologies could offer. At the same time the diffused ability and the technical skill of the reproduction of an image has imposed to the creators new interpretative consequences and crisis situations depending on their sensitivity in connection to the necessity of the production of the image.

This desire of techniques that lead us back to a process of re-appropriation of manual ability in the artistic reproduction and also the process that produced the work and the image and the history that constitutes it doesn’t deny technology, instead it recontextualizes it in the incessant quest of a humanization of the product without it having to demonstrate the technical modernity from which it may derive. Padraig Timoney finds his connotation in the capability of producing images that technically and conceptually contain the principles with which the incessant need to explain the world’s aspects through the artistic work unwinds. This, in the vision of the Irish artist , isn’t freed  from historicity, nor does it avoid the confront of contemporaneity in a nostalgic vision of materials or hedonistic satisfaction of artistic skill. The diversity of techniques or languages used don’t  want to demonstrate a supposed visual eclecticism  but confirm how the parts of this macro and microcosm are an integral part of the vision of contemporaneity of the work in the present context we are living in. Exemplifying, we could define it all like a visual  hypertext in which the elements combine between themselves without ever betraying the content’s peculiarity of the single work in favour or disadvantage of another one, without ever trivially revealing which is the centre or a part of it because everything exists and finds in its own existence the reason to be present and taking part in the creative process that subtends the realization of the image. In this there is the affirmation of the importance of the work as a creative unique of the artist and the capability of translating in image the content through the technique of realization of its process. In this exhibition the artist exposes a great painting “Museum Metropolitan” in which we see an image of the Naples underground station: it is the image of a great metal plate placed in the underground for commercial adverts and so, vehicle of other images. The artist recontextualizes the image, through painting, and reproduces what is contained on this mirror-type surface, and what appears to us is the vision of his reflex which at the same time seems to give us elements for a distorted vision of a metropolitan landscape.

To accompany the great painting, Timoney places some photographs: in one there is a big black truck, nearly a cosmic transmission of an element that absorbs every source of light all the more reason why one would think about its size and to what it may mysteriously contain; the other photograph is double and shows two identical landscapes and a movie character in black and white and in colour. This last image once again leads us to one of the artist’s dearest topics telling us that the assimilation of an image has three recording degrees: the moment in which we perceive, the one in which we fix in mind and finally when this becomes part of our memory. Nothing of what we perceive is lost in our mind, the images help us, or emerge from our deep subconscious, and the artist places on himself the possibility and the necessity to translate it, through different techniques, to our sight.