The art criticism below was written in 2007 for a multilingual catalogue listing the acquisition of Taylor´s photographic works and a painting.

The art collection is housed in Hotel Cheval Blanc, in the Alpine town of Courchevel, France. You may view parts of this collection owned by Mr Bernard Arnault at www.chevalblanc.com.

RESPIRATION (2004 – 2007) photo no 3 (part a):
the searing white light might be a blinding flash of heat, white hot. Yet the shooting streams of white light are matched by the real heat of the red formation, seeming to burn upwards like the bright flames of a fire. This is the Tube, the machine transporting humans blended into parallel forms of colour, towers of gold, white, red, bronze, dark brown and orange flames focussed into streams of light, showing us the exquisite speed of movement.

RESPIRATION photo no 5:
here the artist seems to be putting on the brakes to the rapid, fierce movement captured in the structured prisms of light illuminated in the previous photos. Suddenly the burning red streams are contained in a single, calm shot of light, with two white bars gently though forcefully regulating the colours surrounding them. The wild bronzes and golds of the prior sets have given way to domesticated, tame beige and shades of coffee brown, with all these strips and streams of light framed by the bookend effect of the two black borders sealing off the end of each of the outer panels.

RESPIRATION photo no 11:
the black borders of photo 5 lead us onto a higher plane of being and a purer state of mind in this cleverly divided set of 5 panels. Again the reddish colours of the everyday Tube transport us to a sublime, trance-like state. The whispers of rapidly moving light, of captured objects and forms, mutate from black to brown, and slowly transform – from left to right in the manner of Western reading - into a glowing pool of pink and gold. The reddish orange stripes mixed with lilac and purplish pink hues express a joyous mood, one of human contentment found in a luxurious, safe, red and purple harbour of light, which is almost decadent in its overflowing feelings of transcendence.

RESPIRATION photo no 21 (part b):
a blue stripe seeps into the texture of a nondescript wall, the elongated halo that suffuses the most concrete object - a solid wall, a fortified tunnel, the deepest parts of the earth under a city, or the “Underground”, as it is penetrated by an azure stream of light, captured in a most unexpected way.

SOUTH AFRICA  ENERGY:   
Panels A & B The spotted cow hide was prepared in a traditional way by the Zulu tribespeople of South Africa. It is the focal point of this painting using mixed media on board.  Ironically the patch of treated animal fur and skin is again split into a metaphysical, cross-purpose space: it is cut and placed in opposition to itself by two wooden boards.

The breaking of this naturalistic entity is reinforced by the silvery, papered and tarred patch reflecting the cow hide at the lower bottom right corner of Panel B.  It reminds the viewer of the original form, now reconstructed and treated a second time by the artist, not the Zulu, and then a third, fourth time or multiple times by the spectators who repeatedly view this work of art.

The elements of the raw materials are reframed and restructured into a semi-neat patchwork or “visual architecture”, reinforced by the aluminium, tar and white house paint washing over the rearranged materials.

In another ironic shift, “reading” the painting from right to left in an Oriental fashion or non-Western manner, the submerged and barely discernable patchwork pattern of rectangles shown delicately on Panel b are suddenly wiped away on Panel A.

The delicate white rectangle carefully encased in a protective band of bronze on B vanishes entirely on A.  The fragile, translucent patch has possibly been lost under the strong shades of white and grey and the formidable, industrial paints it struggles with in its larger counterpart panel, as have its replicated series of smaller rectangles that seem to emanate from the original patch, the natural hide of flecked animal fur shared by both panels.