Pádraig Timoney ‘Fontwell Helix Feely’

Pádraig Timoney’s largest exhibition to date, of paintings alongside a selection of his photographs and object works, shed light on twenty years of an incomparable and mercurial practice.

In appearance Timoney’s paintings are radically diverse. He deploys an expansive repertoire — using expressive and hard-edged abstraction, realism, text and graphics, chemical treatments and found objects — to construct unique sets of images. These amount to an exploration of how paintings and their images are constructed, as objects and representations of phenomena. Timoney’s work is in part founded in the classical role of the artist, recording subjective experience. Following playful idiosyncratic associations he breaks down and reconstructs what he reads, dreams, observes or thinks. In other instances he treats the canvas as space for alchemical-like transformations where mental processes, ideas and experience are materialised. Through various approaches to the reconstruction of images — materially, cognitively and perceptually — Timoney plays out his imagination over a dazzling variety of surfaces.