243 Luz is proud to present a duo exhibition featuring paintings by Jack Otway (1991, U.K.) and drawings by Richard Tinkler (1975, USA). 

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Both artists share rigorous studio practices driven by similar labor intensive inquiries into the formal structures of abstraction. Both land on an image terrain where psychedelic, drifting, stratified charges of colour are anchored by geometric frameworks.

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Jack Otway’s new paintings are lush, slick, sensual and inherently architectonic. His kaleidoscopic abstract canvases vibrate with hallucinatory intensity. They produce the effect of an after image by layering topographic underpaintings with measured geometries.. Their laminous and luminous surfaces are visual traps that lead the viewer’s eye looping deeper into the work.

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Having previously titled paintings in the sequence they were made 043, 044, etc., here Otway points his works toward a more concrete thematic scheme. All the titles allude to altered states- Nepenthe – the mythological drug for forgetting sorrow. Sundown – the time of day where people living with dementia experience the most confusion. False Doors – those of ancient Egyptian tombs inscribed with spells to guide the spirit from the living world to the underworld. Burr Hole – a hole made through trepanation; sometimes opening the third eye, sometimes releasing pressure on the skull, sometimes to induce a permanent euphoric condition.

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In Richard Tinkler’s work there is a specific temporal order, that too simplistically would be read as a meditative state, but is perhaps more to do with the labour process, pure mathematics, and active problem solving. While his paintings seem to trace time into their material composition (they’re often painted in one day, wet-on-wet), the vast archive of over 1000 drawings attest to a different element of his practice, where deeply complex geometries are meticulously developed across intricate net-like scapes. The sinewy ink lines seem to bloom in opposing directions, like networks of mycelium.

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For Tinkler, the subtle inconsistencies of repetition are a central interest. A passage may be duplicated numerous times as it works its way out of the centre of the page, yet the shapes, line and colour are never exactly the same. He works on multiple drawings at once, skipping between them, each work in the sequence informing another. Notably, if a work leaves his studio, he will remake it.

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Presented in the gallery are 4 seemingly ‘unfinished’ or abandoned drawings from last year. Works that Tinkler returned to to find that they had delivered a potentiality further emphasised by not completing the grid. In both artist’s work there is a deeper mathematical implication: geometry as the foundational science, as an evolving manner of handling the space we inevitably inhabit. In the case of both Otway and Tinkler, their practices are rooted in an ancient call to abstracting space, translating it into quasi-concrete shapes that unveil the realisation of a human-induced reality, one subjective and prone to slippage.