Although the intentions are not purely identical, Larry Madrigal brings back to mind the themes, atmospheres and certain colors of Pierre Bonnard when he paints his wife, Marthe, or Honoré Daumier when he depicts a washerwoman holding a child by the hand (Dragged, 2024). Tim Sandow, for his part, seems to remain faithful to the idea of a realism (No land, 2024), in the manner of the Frères Le Nain - when they paint figures staring at us - that elevates the common, the anecdotal and the everyday to the level of what deserves to be represented, on canvas. The two painters are even more closely aligned, moreover, in their attention to the fragility of detail, to luminous reflections and to gestures that are desperately solitary or in search of attention. One looks at relationships from a more familial and personal angle, the other detaches itself from it to show, with a certain dose of irony, the vicissitudes of the lives of small characters attached to a goal or a function that is, in the end, a little beyond them. In any case, these characters also exist, and all of them, through their discrepancy: a form of dissonance is born between love and the dish burning in the oven, between a man with a gun and a perplexed pigeon. But the twilights respond in chorus to the crises of a child or the doubts of an agent. The two painters' palettes are full of nuances, remembrance and absurdities, both beautiful and curious. And only one thing is certain: they both have the color of memory.
Larry Madrigal (*1986, US) works and lives in Phoenix, USA. He received his BFA and MFA from Arizona State University, Tempe.
Tim Sandow (*1988, DE) works and lives in Wuppertal, Germany. He graduated from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien in 2019 with Daniel Richter.
