Trystan Bates Collages Are Reconstructed Paintings That Turn Chaos Into Order
Trystan Bates work lies somewhere between collage and painting, his art a meticulous process of converting chaos into order. Unlike many painters Bates makes paintings only to destroy them, ripping and slashing the canvas into fragments only to carefully collect the pieces and make a new work, a collage. This is deconstruction inverted. You might say he is a re-constructive collage artist.
While the destruction of his paintings might seem anarchic his collages are quite the opposite. They are the inverse, the other side, the yin of his yang. A mirror image, a distorted memory of what was. Each fragment carefully applied, sometimes with tweezers, to make the final image. In some ways Bates follows in the modernist tradition, the deconstruction of the familiar in order to reveal some inner truth that lies beneath the surface that is not limited by our perception of the World around us. Bates wants to challenge us, make us see the order within the chaos. As he says on his site:
My work and progress is centered largely around the construction of something new out of something which has been destroyed. It is about the possibility of creating something coherent out of a pile of otherwise unconnected and useless fragments.
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