Closing Time
Closing Time is a new painted manifestation of a person dressed as Yogi Bear, portrayed tackling some rapids in a rubber dingy in the earlier work Transcendental Meditations. Here the figure is shown gliding gently across a Monet lily pond on a pedalo towards his double. The title prosaically refers to the time when a bar closes, yet also to the large graphic ‘O’ that the two yogis form; both a giant zero and a comic play on the Eastern symmetrical and centred forms of the mandala or yin/yang symbols, representing the individual and the universal. In this sense, perhaps, as the two Yogis eternally close on each other, closing time hints at the enclosure or stilling of time presented by painting - its temporal manufacture and embalmed stasis.
In the background we are offered a representation of Monet’s pond at Giverny and associations with Post-Impressionism: the reconciliation of the painted surface and illusory depth, a metaphor for a greater philosophical synthesis of the self and the world, of nature and culture. So Closing Time represents the forlorn desire to return to a state of harmony: to transcend the restrictions and distortions of our late-capitalist, culturally diffused and categorised world, indeed, with a belief that the nature of things is coming closer to the surface (of the canvas or screen) through the agency of the digital wilderness, the Internet; a vortex of disintegration and sublimation.
There is no horizon.
