Trevor Vickers // Sydney Contemporary 2018

Trevor Vickers

Trevor Vickers, Untitled, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 90cm
Trevor Vickers, Untitled, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 90cm

New work by Trevor Vickers for Sydney Contemporary 2018 at Carriageworks. Booth A03.

'If you look carefully at these latest works, what are apparently background colours rarely touch more than one edge of the canvas, and generally stop short of the picture. This edge treatment … it’s where the magic happens.

The whole of the painting comes alive, and the spaces start moving into and out of the picture plane … the viewer is taken in and out of the space, as suggested by ricochets to and from the edges into the canvas. Each time you go in, you go into a different spatial order … it’s as if some of the spaces in the painting come forward to receive applause, then recede, allowing other spaces to the do the same.

With Vickers’ paintings, there is a dynamic that occurs in the relationship between the viewer and the painting, which has to be, like other paintings, a fixed entity. But the multiplicity of readings, none of which tidies up and fixes the painting, produces a constant flow of relationships, a choreography of perception. This flow is the duration, given a perceptual form of disorder, partial order, joy and delight, disarray and then order again … Vickers’ works are dependent on his clear articulation of the ambiguity of language, but their power and lasting impact depends even more on the willingness of the viewer to chase down all the spatial combinations. One after another.'

Alex Selenitsch, excerpt from Trevor Vickers: Untitled Painting, published by Art Collective WA