SODA CON VISTA is an exhibition that does not leave one indifferent: it makes the unspeakable sadnesses and the outrageous banalities speak. The two notions often come together in Tim Sandow's paintings, to give birth to a great fresco full of observations and questionings. The artist paints a daily life oscillating between melancholy, brief moments of poetry sometimes, solitude and silence.
Violence, sometimes, comes to interfere in the decor of these urban scenes, silent and discreet. Without being grandiloquent, it is elevated to the rank of historical interest when nothing here is worthy of the great History.
And this is precisely the value of these paintings: in the manner of the realists of the 19th century, the painter uses comical and anecdotal scenes to get out of an official discourse that never goes beyond the frame. Here, the unusual choice of subjects, the impression of looking behind the curtain, à la Degas, forges this indefinable feeling of modernity.
Thwarted by a unique style and almost dreamlike in its partial distortion, these infinitesimal and insignificant dramas become bearable: like a memory drawn from a misty past, the twist and the manner allow the works to develop a discourse that would be too brutal if it were only realistic. The artist's original and very personal, though classical, touch creates a vocabulary of its own, between strangeness, reminiscence and instantaneous vision, almost cinematographic.
The artist's colors, never aggressive, in pastel shades, give expression to half-despairing wall sections and support the astonishing strength of the themes treated, the unusual framings and compositions. Since 2016, the artist's style has evolved a lot, without however ever disobeying a personal and convinced aesthetic. And this fidelity to a way of doing things, without concession and with conviction, some call it the mark of the great.
