Tim Head: Fictions, Parafin Gallery

There is something about abstract art that is metaphysical in the way it attempts to represent the un-representational, making it a curiously appropriate tool to use when addressing the digital. As the technological revolution ushers us into the virtual, the veteran British artist Tim Head seems to agree.
Head doesn’t enjoy the fame he probably should, considering he is one of the very few first generation conceptual artists this country has produced. The large scale works in his latest show at Parafin are explicitly concerned with the digital and prove that discussing the technological present isn’t just the remit of young men who spend too much time on social media. These prints look just like paintings and borrow heavily from the history of formal abstraction. But they also glow, effervescently, with a light that painting just simply cannot project. They are attempts to translate the immaterial (and light is defined as such), into a visible, tangible form. The Invisible Cities UV inkjet print– large overlapping circles of cyan and magenta – feels like Venn diagrams illustrating the perpetual motion of process while the heavier works, Alphaville and Solaris, take this logic to its quite terrifyingly logical conclusion. The dense patterns of these prints describe the macro slipping into the micro, the place where our ability to understand the world around us is dwarfed by the infinite relationships between parts.