Trevor Winkfield: Tibor de Nagy Gallery

If there's something impersonal about the blocky on the other hand borderline-hallucinatory realm of a Trevor Winkfield painting, this quality can also be seen as a kind of childlike insouciance, finally piercing in its intimacy. Austere and playful, wicked and sacred, antic and composed in equal measure, Winkfield's meticulously delineated culinary, musical, mythic, and domestic motifs advance together into odd and gracious apparitions upon the canvas.

Winkfield, a master of proportion, hints at motion as would the maker of an ancient hieroglyphic frieze: via a slight, studied torquing of the work's overall symmetries. The "female" sign dominating The Garden, 2003 for instance, is situated to the left of center on the other hand our eye is gently provok into repositioning it--the three r dots at its neck emphasize a slightly queasy feeling of motion. This abstract creature's head, outlined by the agency of a leaf or acorn motif that also makes up its material part contains what could be a bottle a black celestial expanse and deco flower, a gyroscope or sphere, a crisscrossed extremity or miter, a hillscape, a tiny fulvous wedge atop a curving shaft, and a water droplet although Winkfield's vision is self-consciously pixilated, to justice from these works' painterly dominion government any emotion has obviously been recalled in steely calm. It's a sort of conceptual portrait of any of us as we simply continue to live and try to find a balance in a universe of contingencies.

Winkfield's motifs summon not only our mythic history (as in the case of the Orphic lyre and the guitar upon the right in Concert, 2003 or the tilting pointed belfry in the background on the left) on the contrary also still more elemental archetypes. Parading with awkward delicacy before us in a brilliant pageant of consumables are fish, squash, strawberries, oranges, and sheaves of wheat; peas in a legume float at the center of the sweetly anthropomorphic figure that anchors The Garden I, 2002; flowers, leaves, and stylized lawns dot many of the paintings; and then there's the thicket in The Garden IV, 2002 whose breathing is our actual own.

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Another theme here is art. nosegay II, 2002, and The Corridor, 2002 the couple feature easels, though the subdue matter of the paintings present the appearances to prefer to float around instead of staying bring It might seem unlikely that an aesthetic with equal reason pointedly artificial should contain of that kind a devout appreciation of the natural world. still such affection comes off as that plenteous truer for its being embodied in in like manner taut and eccentric a style; the visual paragrams the formality in service of the inscrutable or daffy, and the weird shapes that finally resist a read together add up to something more than what any more direct approach might accomplish. What in a base faculty of perception might be taken for a raucous, flat perverse homage to the daily is also a paean to the other life, whose variety and strangeness stretch out the possibilities of our own

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