Tom Waring | All the Pomp of Yesterday | Tara Downs

All the pomp of yesterday: the title of Tom Waring’s current exhibition at Tara Downs, his third with the gallery, but also a rather evocative phrase. “Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!”: did Waring lift the line from a poem by Rudyard Kipling, that famous “defender of empire”? This might make some sense. Arriving at a fraught and somewhat listless sociopolitical moment across the Western democracies, the paintings on view paradoxically cultivate introspection by shifting toward external cultural anxieties, grappling more forthrightly with legacies of British colonialism and national heritage than Waring has in the past, even if such concerns had been latent from the beginning. The perceived decline of Western political hegemony, alongside the emergence of revanchist forms of populism, together provide an opportunity to dissemble and reconfigure the logical armature of a fading cultural authority. To whom does the past belong? In a subtle prepositional substitution, Waring suggests that Kipling’s pomp was never really ours.

 

Complicated, perhaps, but also exemplary of the complex formalism the artist performs in painting, submitting a vast symbology to a process of deconstruction and reconstruction. Continuing his exploration of illusionistic space, grisaille underpainting, and other devices borrowed from the advent of Renaissance painting, Waring here accentuates the works’ persistent relationship to sculptural relief and architectural forms. In the past, the artist has occasionally broken the trompe l’oeil characteristics of his work by injecting his compositions with flat planes of color, moments of expressionistic brushwork, or other winking references to his chosen medium. Here, befitting the tenor of the exhibition, he operates in pure deception mode, more often than not framing each composition with architectural elements, like steps and scaffolding, that appear to belong to the scene. These framing devices enable us to enter into the work, but also call attention to the illusion constructed in front of us. It’s as if the methods of image-making Waring often elucidates has migrated from a sort of metatextual reflexivity to the forms rooted within the work itself.