TIM WHITE'S EVIDENCE SERIES

Tim White's small scale "Evidence" paintings are based on aerial documentary photographs, many salvaged from the remains of World War II bombers . We may surmise that some of these images record the last parameters of terrain pilots and navigators were to see before hurtling to death in their doomed earthbound carriers during battle crossfire. These images then, can be said to encapsulate various levels of apprehension: they are evidential of sight in the activity of localizing, the gaze soon to be obliterated, and site, once seen and fixed, are soon thereafter figuratively and literally effaced.

White has cropped and reworked the surfaces of his beautiful and intense new series of small acrylics so that, he claims, the source for the paintings are virtually untraceable. Hence, the provocative naming of his new series: Evidence Series.. As the eye scans the surfaces of these mysterious works the casual viewer might be able to convince him/herself that there is no overt visual notation that might serve to identify, in any systematic way, the source material for these works. Indeed, White himself has striven mightily to separate his imagery from his sources. Using significant scale shifts and cropping, as well as palette knife and gels to work the surfaces of his acrylics in order, to (in the artist's words):"turn[ed] them into (a) hand made object of art; with every layer of paint put on the surface subconsciously separating, pushing away the past with all the bitterness from comfortable today, turning ...history into mind games."

Yet, Evidence Series, has been purposefully conceived to draw questions regarding empirical reality and the role and function of belief. Fundamentally, of course, White's new work has very much to do with memories and their impact. The value of White's work, through his hybridizing the photographic image through his painterly techniques , lies in its heightening and nullification of the transparency and mysteriousness of photography (a photograph is a secret about a secret, according to Arbus) . In its secret place the artist substitutes a surface which , while it has a more-than-tangential relationship with its source material than White gives it credit for (more on this below) , wrenches the eye from the emotional detachment that is usually complicit with the photographic image. For the photographic surface White has substituted an empathetic reading of surface and structure which allows the eye to penetrate deep into and under the surfaces of each of his acrylic on board works.

What is fascinating with White's work is that while memory is at the root of his work, perhaps the more crucial reading for Evidence Series is one which takes as its starting-off point the notion that White's paintings are residues, or "residual evidence. " They might be considered, then, evidential terrain for a complex system outside of the bounds of the imagery (the photographic imagery, however lightly inferred) within the picture frame. And this imagery, garnered from the "indexical reality" of the photographic world and abstracted through White's surface and material manipulations, alludes to a complex system not in equilibrium, where differences and details suggest a continuation of internal change, a state of perpetual flux.

Tim White's images have a certain weight because they register at several deep levels at once. The late eminent metallurgist and historian of technology Cyril Stanley Smith relates to us in his epochal "A Search for Structure" how he coined the word "funeous". Based on Jorge Luis Borges's character in Funes the Memorious who labors throughout his life with the burden of not having the capacity to forget anything, Smith uses this word to describe the elasticity in matter itself from the view of physics. Materials, under stress or in the state of deformation carry within their micro-molecular structure organizational paths through which we can observe their retention of original ordering patterns which themselves carry the memory of prior incidents of stress and realignment.

Smith uses this paradigm to explain the need to factor in this aspect of "funicity" to describe historical individuality in complex structures. Funicity, then, is the aspect which accounts for "the generation of new structures, that is, in change, the ordering of the parts that has to pass through a period of explorative contacts and the gradual adjustment and locking in of the slow responses with the fast ones. " Funicity, " Smith continues, "... that is, historical diversity, is rooted in quantified interaction of structural units at various scales of interlock..."

I am taken with White's Evidence Series because, in spite of the artist's claims to the contrary, I do not think his painterly works leave their photographic imprint behind, that they are divested entirely of the pathos of their original imagery. In looking at his new work, there lurks underneath the skeins of paint and the veils of overlaid and re-applied gel medium , however faint and in perpetual interlock with his abstracted surfaces and their resonant patterns of degraded immanence , the soul of photography. Within the structure of White's paintings , through their sumptuous deformations and elasticities, we find their funeous aspects subliminally recalling the underlying photographic imagery which is the fertile source of his picture-making. In White's paintings, what is inferred from his final fragments of re-condensed photographically-based information is a secret about a secret: a revelation of history regarded as a ceaseless condition of perpetual change, a shifting of one level of apprehension to another. This fleeting , sensual aspect of variability and mutability which oscillates between the sensation of subjectivity and objectivity is the most significant aspect in White's work and the source of its chief visual pleasures. The artist's traces of photographic effacement of his bombardiers' last imagery through painterly intervention paradoxically reconstitutes and reinvigorates his original apocalyptic subject matter: the memory of sight about to lose memory of itself.

Dominique Nahas

Dominique Nahas is a critic and independent curator based in Manhattan. A regular contributor to "Review" magazine, his articles have been published in "Sculpture", "C", "Trans" and "New Observations". He is the former curator of contemporary art at Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY and the former director of the Neuberger Museum/SUNY-Purchase. His many curating credits include museum retrospectives of the work of Nancy Spero and Les Levine and the most recent exhibition, Bypass, for the KunstmuseumBonn (September 1997).