Tim White: Evidence

My initial encounter with Tim White's paintings was with his larger-scale paintings. The pictoriality of these surfaces was something the viewer could arbitrate. By arbitration I refer to the manner in which one delegates a place -- a corporeal sense of viewing -- within the surface.
White's larger paintings are filled with dimensionality and light, texture, and nuance. They herald an abundance of openings, apertures, places where one can enter and engage in a type of sensory experience. Yet this sensory experience also has a deep resonance. There is something ineluctably futuristic about White's work. It is futuristic in the sense of a metaphysical encounter with a fleeting space, a space-time that enunciates itself and that offers another reality or a glimpse of another reality. These are paintings that give us an impression of a transfiguration of the edge of the dream.
I have to say that the current exhibition, Evidence, captures the sensations of light and metaphysical reality in a related but distinct manner. First of all, these small paintings are purposefully well-crafted. They are based on World War II reconnaissance photographs. We are seeing traces of battlefields and the aftermath of conflagrations. We are witness to a horrific spectacle that is somehow out of our vision. Again, we get an aestheticized vision. Something has taken place. It is difficult to get the sense of exactly what it was. Something happened -- to use the phrase of the novelist Joseph Heller -- and we feel it strongly, even within these abbreviated places. White's small paintings are primarily in blues, whites, and blacks. There are some recent two paneled works with lavender dry pigment that has been placed in-between layers. In other words, the surface has been built up and layered giving us a translucent sense of seeing through something, sensing another world, a private vision, a fleeting sensation of another world. This is what gives Tim White's painting their sense of ontological elasticity. They are given to light and they tell the aftermath of an impression, yet we cannot escape being there.

Robert C. Morgan

NY Arts Magazine Issue 16 December 1997- January 1998.