Timothy ARCHER

"Of Birds and Gods I / Cosmogonies

Discover Timothy Archer's new oil on canvas and oil and pastel paintings on paper in the first part of his new exhibition "Of Birds and Gods" entitled "I / Cosmogonies" which signifies the birth of a world in primordial chaos.

"There are moments in painting that suspend time and history, and chapters of our own narrative that once opened seem to draw the whole known universe into their centre. A black dot becomes a spiral, then metamorphoses into an elegant nautilus that may one day turn into a whole galaxy.

This exhibition finally makes the link between me and myself, between the symbolism that has inhabited my mind since my early childhood and the filigree of my human experience.

I know that I know nothing, except perhaps that from the beginning, from the first breath, everything was already there.

Like a treasure hunt, we sow behind us small pieces of bread for the less fortunate, and for the others, pebbles that are much more practical if one day we wish to understand our own wanderings on this earth.
The painter, even more fortunate, sows images, stories, laughter interspersed with cries, moments of memory permanently inscribed somewhere, between the retina and the reptilian brain of those he gives to see.

Paradigms--Counter-spells--Didascalia--Chants and Golems--Birds and Gods--Cosmogonies

In the manner of a troubadour or a bard or a druid, I have sown ideas in the world, gently, delicately, without understanding until now that it was my mind that I was sowing, that these ideas and these tales would change the movement of my hand and the greed of my eye forever.

In this exhibition, shot in my mind like an allegory in motion, I chose to invoke the myths that are dear to me, the legends that helped me breathe, the primordial soup that nourishes me and the colourful fire that inhabits me. For to become one's own dream, one must also become a demiurge and invoke brushstroke after brushstroke a new world filled with archetypal servants or allies. Where there is harshness everywhere, the hypnotic movement of the brush can smooth the edges.
Where there are dictators, the artist need only evoke anarchy. Where the world is bored, he invokes magic.

It is therefore in the idea of a journey into the blue and black depths of the abyss that I chose to plant my flag, in a symbolic dive into the heart of a world that is silent by nature that I was able to listen to myself better, and by the salvation offered by a strange rebound that only those authorised to play with the meaning of things know,
it is enough to say to oneself, as Hermes sometimes does, that all that is above is like that which is below, and all that is below is like that which is above that the abyss becomes the infinite space contained in the confines around us everywhere present that the ocean becomes a forest, that the Whale becomes an elephant and the fish flying through the air becomes without difficulty the mythical bird of Lake Stymphalus.

In the cultures of the world of yesterday and today, I have sought the trace of the image of a free traveller, witness to the birth and fall of empires, who, through his resilience, has become a beacon, a symbol of the creative chaos that surrounds us and inhabits us.
From the Celtic Lugus to Hermes/Mercury, from the image of the wandering Jew to that of the Hermit of the Tarot de Marseille. The madman, the sorcerer, the artist, the pythia, the healer or Aesop himself, are those who have always played with the zeitgeist and tamed the draughts of an archaic palace filled with hatred and sadness.

For in order to carry the heavy, rattling trousseau of a whole universe of fiery symbols, the graphical vocabulary of hard-won images and the primordial, biting bestiary that has always been at our side, one must first and foremost understand that one must still "have chaos in oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star. Timothy Archer, January 2022