UNDER THE TIRE, OVER THE ASPHALT
Manuel P. Rosado
Entitled “Under the tire, over the asphalt,” Timsam Harding (Málaga, 1992), presents in the ‘Sala BBAA’ of the School of Fine Arts, his third solo exhibition.
The keys to his work remain in the new pieces he presents, and other dynamic’s arise through new practices in his current production, concerning methodology, processing and materials.
Exhibited in this new show are a set of pieces where behaviors and gestures are the arguments that articulate the project.
So on one hand, the paper’s, photograph’s or videos shown are elements that are intended to express the actions of the process, situations, footprints, marks.
And on the other hand, new sculptural pieces, many of them from trials and experiments developed in recent months, occupy the space generating a set of free standing works, some on the floor and others self held, which create a circut for the wandering spectator.
The sculpture is materialized in rubber, metal and lead. Odd shapes of lead, aligned, embracing or resting on a body of rubber, from the fragments to form. These are coverings and cutouts of rubber wheels, and lead castings made on the same piece. Therefore, parts that start from the same matrix, a disjointed from an interior and an exterior. Molding, with its duality of liquid and solid, and anti-form shape, weight and dispersion, object and event, container and content, thus interrogating the material of the work.
In his sculptural practice Timsam Harding had dealt with the tire as a fetiche, as debris of an event, however, now incorporating lead parts, molten lead castings, covers part of the surface of the tire, giving these sculptures a copy and reference. A positive and a negative.
The process of producing a lead sculpture consists of a series of basic steps. Lead is heated in a container, and then the artist pours the molten lead along the hollow rubber wheel. Its a methodical process, that advances covering, starting at one end of the wheel and ending back at the starting point. When lead cools and adheres, it converts the rubber and bonding in a kind of container, a mold. The cooled lead is removed from the walls and shown as a separate object. These lead castings are approximately 20 by 40 by 80 centimeters.
Regarding the work on paper, these present pieces undergoing actions and games, degrading the paper, opening or tearing, generating a sequence of linear markings that indicia suggest some kind of event.
Postminimalism, Art Povera, Land-Art and Conceptual Art, favor the idea of the process over the finished work. Timsam Harding experiments with the potential of materials, working with the three-dimensions in favor of gesture and characterized by a new approach that focuses on the process.
The journey and the event now refer to Serra or Szeemann, Robert Smithson or Robert Morris, Rosalind Krauss. There ideas on each other and on themselves, is something that Harding feeds off to plot a story according to his tastes, gestures and behaviors. A story full of experiences and anectdotes, sunsets and landscapes.
The exhibition becomes a territory of dialect, a place where the works establish reciprocal relations, and where Harding establishes affinities between process and production, between building and installing, between working and using.
Finally, what we see in the exhibition space are a series of pieces ranging from concepts, processes, situations, gestures and behaviors. Putting on an equal footing the result as the process.
November 13, 2020.