PARIS.- Persona—the outer limits of self, hung on as mask, a bit of artifice. In the paintings of Tom Allen, a mysterious, ineffable plentitude emerges from the folds of promissory surfaces, projections of the masked, and the saturated effects, intensities of light and colour, which animate the strange surfeit as a kind of subject. Cloven and concealed, yet inexhaustibly present, are conformations and complexions that tell of a concealed presence, still invisible, yet surely there, as a possible threat, or lure, cached in high contrast and prodigious detail. Allen’s recent paintings, namely, are drawn out of, and into, the complex double movements of the titular ‘personae’—the scorpion and the bull, opposing signs courted from across distant asterisms and tropical lines; twin orchids, spotted with unseeing eyes, open wide; the sorrow chasing nepenthes, ‘quieting all pain and strife’; and, more enigmatic, the withdrawn masquerade of faces in low relief, weaving together the organic and inorganic, like a delicate filigree, spinning concepts of alterity, attraction, and transmutation into the work’ surface.
Maurice Blanchot: “For the edges of a secret are more secret than the secret itself.”1 Here, as elsewhere in Allen’s oeuvre, things shift in gemlike perspectives, glittering and glowing, grotesquely transposed, vibrant, virile, and ablaze. The edges of subjects flow and curve and spiral to near-imperceptibly incorporate; this undoing of contour reveals the attractive influence that forces contradictory forms to coalesce. Out of the dispersal, dissimulation, and breaking of Allen’s imposing personae, the tactile trespass of twinned forms, one into the other, the paintings point to the tropical element in all creation.
“Night is the winter of the tropics,” as the common saying goes. “Tropic is the shadow from which all realistic discourse flees,”2 confirms Hayden White. The night, the shadow, too, as personae—guise, veil, cover, hailing the mask’s etymological origins as specter, nightmare. Allen’s vivid life forms, precious stones, like Charon’s eyes ablaze, hail both passion and horror, life and decay. The mask protects, but also projects; it conceals, and wards off. After all, it is common to speak of masks as protective, “covering to hide or guard the face”; that is, as a defensive phenomenon of uncertain origins, which belongs to the realms of the eternally vigilant—the contingency of the ‘qui vive?’, those wide awake, and yet solicitous, theatrical. Here too, then, the masks’ projected personae stage a doubling, played out as a transformative influence, which motions surfaces to forge contact—as language. Allen’s strategic masks, then, serve the operative function of making a withdrawn interiority— desire, bane, poison, potential—emerge through an expressive valence projected at surface.
Unfixed from their proper place in the firmament, the signaling personae, such as the scorpion and the bull, come forth from other disciplines of thought to govern the painterly field. There, conflicts, contradictions, and correspondences fold into ornate density. The unnamable complexity of the mask, as carapace or armor, theatrical guise or ornamental surface, libidinal current or force of death, exaggerates some essential condition, a concealed interiority—desire, bane, poison, potential—to the point of feverish contradiction. A structural logic underwrites the esoteric. Everything is drawn to the limit, of what can be known, intuited, felt. The encounter, here, is between the finite, the painted field, the tropic figure, fixed star, and the transforming influence of the infinite play, just beyond the surface. In the spiral density of these complementary conflicts, opposites in correspondence, conversation, one imagines movement, reverberating and resounding. Personae, as it were, as something played out.
Like so, the dissimulated, the isolate, and alienated radiate, invisibly, with intoxicating and vital potential. And yet, Allen’s unique viscerality remains as the inevitable, enticing paradox at heart, an endless challenge and puzzle. In these works, vast spaciousness fills with re-invention, as progress, by magical placement and the immediate spark of contact. Intertwining astrological, aesthetic, and formal elements, Allen’s personae menace an affective, experiential space—forever filling with potential, precious life, in relation with its inevitable destructiveness. — Sabrina Tarasoff
TOM ALLEN
Born in 1975, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA Lives and works in Los Angeles, California, USA
Tom Allen’s floral paintings, intricate and intensely chromatic, are based on his own photographs, reflections of his direct experience of plants in situ. Far from the post- mortem display of still-life, or the passive features of pastoral fantasy, his subjects are brimming with vitality and insight, holding court in environments humming with artifice.
Employing small-scale canvases, highly choreographed compositions and meticulous technique, Allen’s work shivers with a visceral synesthesia of concentrated color, movement and space. In these paintings, being and seeing merge, mood and surface coalesce, bringing to life images that look right back at you, fierce and resolute. A selection of recent solo exhibitions includes :The Hour, The approach, London, 2023; The Song, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles, 2021; The Promise, The Approach, Londres, 2021; Præternatura, Air de Paris, Romainville, 2020; La-Bas, Lulu, Mexico City, 2019; et The Lovers, Bel Ami, Los Angeles, 2017. Recent group exhibitions include : Trespass Sweetly Urged, Tanya Leighton, Berlin, 2024; Felix Art Fair, Presentation with Angeline Rivas, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles, 2024; Immersed, Jack Siebert Projects, Los Angeles, 2023; Imperfect paradise, Barbati Gallery, Venezia, 2023; A Minor Constellation, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles, 2022; Particularities, X Museum, Pékin, 2021; Fuck you be nice, Air de Paris, Romainville, 2020; Blue Flowers, Le Maximum, Los Angeles, 2019; Symbolisms, Cooper Cole, Toronto, 2017; Ruins in the Snow, High Art, Paris, 2017; et A Change of Heart, Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles, 2016.
His work can be found in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Sweeney Gallery at the University of California, Riverside, the X Museum, Beijing, and in numerous private collections.
1 «Car les abords d’un secret sont plus secrets que lui-même»: Blanchot, Michel, Le Livre à venir, Paris, Gallimard, 1986, p. 259
2 White, Hayden, Tropics of Discourse : Essays in Cultural Criticism, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1978, p. 2
