Prospect, the title of the exhibition refers to an experience of landscape both as vista and, perhaps more significantly, as an anticipated event. So familiar are we with images of the world through TV and the press that the possibility of discovering somewhere new when we travel has, for the most of us, been replaced by a process of confirming our expectations.
Tim Braden’s paintings also refer to J.K Huysmans ideas about the power of the imagination as a substitute for experience, expressed in his 1884 novel, A Rebours. Other paintings are inspired more directly by V.G Sebald’s novel Vertigo, in which he discusses the problems of remembering.
The images from this exhibition are culled from a number of car journeys through Europe, North Africa, Russia Japan and the US. Beaudrillard has suggested that the experience of driving inevitably leads one to see the landscape ‘televisually’ as scenarios. For Tim Braden the windscreen becomes literally both filter and frame through which flashes of information appear then disappear before we can fully absorb them. His paintings attempt to reconstruct these glimpses.
Tim Braden (born 1975) studied painting at the Academy of Fine Art in St Petersburg before his BA in Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford. In 2001 he made an animated short film ‘The Sound and the Fury’ (more details at www.britshorts.com). He has exhibited in London, including group shows at Neon gallery and Vilma Gold, New York and Germany. This will be his first solo painting show in London.
