Art of Tim Caton

2009-02-02T13:02:00.000-08:00

Tim Caton's recent paintings reconfigure comic book heroes by channeling tabloid vernacular and vigilante vocabularies into searing diagrams of struggle and growth. The artist's own tussle within the art making process is visible and visceral in much of his work. For example, patterned scratch marks that score the surfaces of his large paintings draw the viewer into the depths of each piece. Figuration, illustration, and architectural rendering is also added to texture his paint.

The legend of Batman, whose parents were murdered, provides the backdrop for this body of work. Abbreviations of retribution and the irresolvable nature of random events, combined through the artist's extravagant brushwork, tip his canvases toward process works. Caton's characterizations of personal peril are humorous, frightening, redeeming, and frank. Their emotional charge, which appears fundamental, also highlights the limits and power of scripts.

In his recent series, Caton has begun painting over his previous work. These masks, comparisons, and juxtapositions investigate various meanings of scale. While inversions of signatures and subliminal texts appear at the surface and submerged from below, new images of towers also convery a measure of height from which things may fall. Since scaling tall buildings signals profoundly the kinds of things that heroes can do, Caton's visual climb through his layers of paintings, likewise seems steep, but so is the view.