“This year is a mess,” says Tim Kent as sweat drips from his head. “Nothing is done, everything is unfinished, and I’m not happy with any of it.”
It is the Friday night of Bushwick Open Studios, and there is less than half an hour until the start of a reception for friends and supporters. The artist – and former bassist for the Giraffes – is stretched out on a brown leather sofa under his loft bed. As soon as his girlfriend Charlotte, clad in black, begins cooing about the library he built for her, he makes an anxious beeline for his workspace at the far end of the apartment and continues cleaning, clearing.
Unfinished work hangs on the walls, lines the floor. On one canvas, the room of a house is blocked in peaches and blues, almost entirely without lines. On other canvases there are naked women – rushed, furious, sensual. The nudes are his latest obsession – some of which were first showcased at this year’s Bushwick Open Studios.
“I’ve been doing the architectural spaces for so many years,” he says. “I’m not tired of it; they’re just getting a bit much, and I’m not looking at it with a fresh eye, and I’m looking for a way out of it.”
Tim Kent (Photo: Eric Reichbaum)
“It works on two levels,” he says of the geometry in his rooms. “It is the fundamental rule for realist art – that moment when we suddenly get control over our visual landscape and the moment we are able to construct a space so that our brain reads it. There’s also something so fundamentally modern about it. It’s got an element of complete abstraction in the lines upon lines. It’s the complete abstraction and the complete realism – the perfect system of visual play. And that’s why I like it. ” And then he looks off, dreamily.
Recently, feeling as though he has too meticulously deconstructed the interior spaces so that they’re now melting, blending and falling apart before us – he has gone back to people.
The nudes, he says, are the antithesis of architectural rigor. “If I can get to a point where [the figures and the architecture] are melded together, I think I’ll actually have achieved something in art.”
At the reception, models, artists, and young bookish friends mingle with older patrons. Everyone is going to a dance party at the National Arts Club later.
According to Kent, his home gallery used to get approximately 150 visitors on the weekends during Bushwick Open Studios in 2008. Today, with so many traditional galleries in the neighborhood, his home gallery gets far fewer visitors. At his reception, though, there is much enthusiasm and a sophisticated group of interested patrons and viewers.
Kent, a pioneer in the Bushwick art scene, believes the influx of new galleries was inevitable, but he misses a sense of community. “You go outside and you say hi to everybody,” he says of the old days. “And at some point you party with them, hard, and they’ve seen you looking like a real retard or you’ve seen them looking like a real retard and everybody is completely forgiving and there is nothing to judge you on. And I mean everybody, like, the kids from the hood, to the dudes who ride motorcycles to the Roberta’s Pizza people, to, you know, the artists and all these people. And everyone was cool with everybody.
“But what I do notice, now, is that everybody is becoming more cliquish and there is more of a scene happening. And I think that is a bit juvenile. And in some ways that’s the end of the Golden Era of this neighborhood.”
Kent’s frustration extends to the culture at large. Much like he feels he cannot look at his architectural interiors with a fresh eye, he also sees that our society has peaked in terms of what it can do with all of the information it has been amassing during his generation. For him, the information age can be overwhelming. In light of so much multimedia attention and multi-tasking, he is forced to reckon with the dilemma of whether his time and energy are actually going towards anything productive or meaningful. “We’re flatlining,” he says. “Maybe some other society is going to do better. Maybe they’ll take what we cannot and make it into something.”
In an age where we text everyone, date online, and largely communicate through social media platforms, he is looking for something more concrete – something to ground him in a society that appears to be floating off into cyberspace. “Julian Assange came out with this great book last year [“Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet”], and in that book he said we are infiltrating each other unknowingly. I guess I can’t live my life counter to that entirely. I don’t even think I want to. But, I want my work to be a counterpoint to that… I guess I just really want something to mean something. And, for me, that something is my work.”
The nude models are a manifestation of him coming full circle, in both his work and as an aim to reclaim his humanity from the non-intimate experience that is living online. Outside of sex, these paintings are one of the most intimate experiences a person can have with someone else. Understanding this, he reserves the paintings for people he knows. “They ask me or I ask them. I like to know the people I paint.”
“It’s just like sex but without all the sexy stuff, if that makes sense. There’s the build up, the flirtation, and then the pillow talk. It’s kind of nice.”
Kent’s home/studio is part of a former commercial building currently protected by the loft laws. He says that even though the neighborhood is changing, he plans to hang onto his apartment for as long as possible.
Kent has solo shows upcoming in October at both Slag Gallery on 56 Bogart Street in Bushwick and at Benoit Gallery in Boston.