Born 1988 | Lives and works in London, United Kingdom
Tomo Campbell (b. 1988) moves between abstraction and figuration in his rhythmic, palimpsestic canvases. The London-based artist culls allegorical imagery from Renaissance paintings — one can find echoes of the composition in Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera, for example — and Netherlandish tapestries, such as the fifteenth-century Hunt of the Unicorn, in paintings that suggest the rich unreliability and mutability of history. Here, recurring motifs of hounds, hunters, and birds intermix with cherubic or Hellenistic bodies and elements of landscape, all of it emerging from a chaos of marks and swaths of color. Campbell sketches his figures with confident, yet tenuous brushwork, such that his scenes appear as illusions or memories. In this way, he offers up heroic or idealized imagery and makes it at once familiar and strange, dislocating the associations we have with historical narratives eternalized in artistic tradition.
Campbell works on multiple paintings at once, building a cohesion, or a narrative thread among them. He achieves a sense that the paintings are intersected and ongoing, sometimes working elements from a new painting back into an earlier one. “I like to exhaust and repeat things, re-editing and cracking into my own process,” he explains. He begins by creating collages from various materials — found images, reproductions of historical paintings, and photos he’s taken himself — arranged in a way to emphasize fluidity. His compositions appear both plotted and spontaneous, with gestures erased and reconceived over long durations. Of this process, he observes, “I try to paint in a way that makes the paint vibrate, to make it look light and delicate and on the cusp of shifting.” Campbell’s style is reminiscent, in some ways, of Cecily Brown’s muscular, feverish brushstrokes, but his are gentler — a quiet staccato. Part of this tenor owes to his palette, which is consistent across his canvases. Pastel, murky, and creamy hues are grounded by passages of pink, cyan, or exuberant orange. These dynamic, seemingly ephemeral paintings pose doubts for the viewer around the historical paintings they sample, as to what is being seen, by whom, and why.
