“Tristram Tyler makes pictures of landscapes which often seem to contain an air of foreboding or melancholy at the same time as a sensual pleasure in the handling of paint. Using his own images of real places as starting points, the paintings are worked over and over, finding in this sometimes brutal evolutionary process their own formal balance. As elements of the original image become abstracted to the point of apparent meaninglessness or simply left out as no longer relevant, other passages of paint intervene and take up positions, changing the tone and mood of the work.

“Once drawn in by their plausible space and enticing colour, the paintings begin to have the effect of unravelling our habitual ways of reading and interpreting what we are looking at. Tyler makes it seem not only reasonable but perfectly correct that a spatter of yellow paint should be emerging from what seems to be part of a concrete flyover or that the only way sand could be on a beach is if someone painted it there, with big sweeping brushstrokes pushing it in like the tide.

“Grounded in the known landscape, these places exist as hybrids of memory and forgetfulness, shaped by the actions of time and their own internal logic, not entirely unlike ourselves.”

Contact: info@tristramtyler.com

Website www.tristramtyler.com