Vitrine Gallery presents Tim Etchells’ new series of drawings ‘Never There’. Etchells continues his work with fragments of text. Isolated combinations of words summon images and questions in which the information that is not supplied, is often just as critical as that which is included in the work itself.
Departing from the colourful acrylics used in his series ‘Personal Statement’ (2015) and ‘Impossible to Concentrate’ (2019), ‘Never There’ sees Etchells working with charcoal, the stark yet fragile black and white of which lends the drawings an urgent, improvised quality. For several of the works - ‘Dance Away’, ‘Never There’ and ‘Out of Nowhere’ - texts appear as negative spaces made via erased areas that emerge from whole sheets of roughly and unevenly charcoal-blackened paper. In terms of the content - as the lockdown context of their production might anticipate - Etchells' drawings summon a landscape of uneasy images - stasis, slowing, unexpected appearance and disappearance, as well as surprising events.
