40 x 58 cm | 15 x 22 in
Subject: People
Original painting in oil on canvas.
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The light, the saturation, the submersion, the elision. These are known qualities of the unknown, in the transience of the passing urban scenes shown here. The snippets of others' lives gleaned in passing are not fulfilled by the complete facts. Thomas Cameron, a 2021 Bloomberg New Contemporary, paints the optical pulse of the city, his scenes crisp and blurred. There is a phenomenological equality in his paintings, an equality between thing, person, group, building, object, flower. The deliberateness is in the way each is framed and lighted; photography is an influence for the artist.
The alighting of attention on the momentary significance of what’s seen - stillness in flux - isn’t less for being momentary. The paintings make a hinge between the incoming future and outflowing past, the interlude of slack water between the tides as they turn. The tangible qualities of the oil paint as it’s applied here is another inroad into awareness of what’s seen, and how. The oil paint is theatrical, but soft more than harsh. It manifests its relation to the urban subjects it depicts, and elucidates the medium's lack of complete access to them. This is alike in theme to Walter Sickert's portraits of city dwellers around the turn of the century, with their depictions of the ordinary drama of the daily grind. In Cameron's work, in subtle ways, the scene surpasses its own ordinariness. The artist examines the detachment induced by consumerism, as well as pushing back against it, pulling toward a more involved, sentient experience of one’s environment.