EARTH TRIP 2007

As we have seen with the Respiration and the Dreaming series, Taylor likes to play with genres so that we are never sure of what we are looking at – is it a painting or a photograph.  In Respiration 2007 and Winter Dreaming he takes the deception one step further and “reuses” his own artworks as material or subject matter.  The viewer does not immediately recognize that the blurred close up colours are the red of the subway or the cheerful bubbles of colour are the underground collapsed to pixels!

Similarly in Earth Trip, Taylor leads us into thinking we have seen these images before, as Earth Trip paintings.  And we have seen them before in another format.  They are in fact photos of these tar paintings inspired and mostly completed in his “holiday” studio on Ibiza island in 2007.

As close ups of the tar paint, house paint and industrial varnish, the images appear to be far from industrial materials sponged in his usual fashion onto canvas.  Indeed it is quite the opposite; these photos look like shots of a dried river bed, holes of black mud and bubbles and cracks of chalky sand and silt. 

They seem to be the rock and moon-like surfaces we have seen in the Earth Trip paintings, but the photographic zooming in on the textures and roughness of the paint turns the material into organic matter, the living, breathing cells that Taylor has already dissected for us as molecules in the Underground.