Persona—the outer limits of self, hung on as mask, a bit of artifice. In the paintings of Tom Allen, a mysterious, ineffable plentitude emerges from the folds of promissory surfaces, projections of the masked, and the saturated effects, intensities of light and colour, which animate the strange surfeit as a kind of subject. Cloven and concealed, yet inexhaustibly present, are conformations and complexions that tell of a concealed presence, still invisible, yet surely there, as a possible threat, or lure, cached in high contrast and prodigious detail. Allen’s recent paintings, namely, are drawn out of, and into, the complex double movements of the titular “personae”—the scorpion and the bull, opposing signs courted from across distant asterisms and tropical lines; twin orchids, spotted with unseeing eyes, open wide; the sorrow-chasing nepenthes, “quieting all pain and strife”; and, more enigmatic, the withdrawn masquerade of faces in low relief, weaving together the organic and inorganic, like a delicate filigree, spinning concepts of alterity, attraction, and transmutation into the work’s surface.
MauriceBlanchot:“For the edges of a secret a remore secret than the secret itself.”1 Here, as elsewhere in Allen’s oeuvre, things shift in gemlike perspectives, glittering and glowing, grotesquely transposed, vibrant, virile, and ablaze. The edges of subjects flow and curve and spiral to near-imperceptibly incorporate; this undoing of contour reveals the attractive influence that forces contradictory forms to coalesce. Out of the dispersal, dissimulation, and breaking of Allen’s imposing personae, the tactile trespass of twinned forms, one into the other, the paintings point to the tropical element in all creation.
“Night is the winter of the tropics,” as the common saying goes. “Tropic is the shadow from which all realistic discourse flees,”2 confirms Hayden White. The night, the shadow, too, as personae—guise, veil, cover, hailing the mask’s etymological origins as specter, nightmare. Allen’s vivid life forms, precious stones, like Charon’s eyes ablaze, signal both passion and horror, life and decay. The mask protects, but also projects; it conceals, and wards off. After all, it is common to speak of masks as protective, “covering to hide or guard the face”; that is, as a defensive phenomenon of uncertain origins, which belongs to the realms of the eternally vigilant—the contingency of the “qui vive?”, those wide awake, and yet solicitous, theatrical. Here too, the masks’ projected personae stage a doubling, played out as a transformative influence, which motions surfaces to forge contact— as language. Allen’s strategic masks, then, serve the operative function of making a withdrawn interiority—desire, bane, poison, potential—emerge through an expressive valence projected at surface.
Unfixed from their proper place in the firmament, the signaling personae, such as the scorpion and the bull, come forth from other disciplines of thought to govern the painterly field. There, conflicts, contradictions, and correspondences fold into ornate density. The unnamable complexity of the mask, as carapace or armor, theatrical guise or ornamental surface, libidinal current or force of death, exaggerates some essential condition, a concealed interiority—desire, bane, poison, potential—to the point of feverish contradiction. A structural logic underwrites the esoteric. Everything is drawn to the limit, of what can be known, intuited, felt. The encounter, here, is one staged between the finite— the painted field, the tropic figure, fixed star—and the transforming influence of the artist’s infinite play on these dimensions. In the spiral density of these complementary conflicts, opposites in correspondence, conversation, one imagines movement, reverberating and resounding. Personae, as it were, as something played out.
Like so, the dissimulated, the isolate, and alienated radiate, invisibly, with intoxicating and vital potential. And yet, Allen’s unique viscerality remains as the inevitable, enticing paradox at heart, an endless challenge and puzzle. In these works, vast spaciousness fills with re-invention, as progress, by magical placement and the immediate spark of contact. Intertwining astrological, aesthetic, and formal elements, Allen’s personae menace an affective, experiential space—forever filling with potential, precious life, in relation with its inevitable destructiveness.
— Sabrina Tarasoff
at Air de Paris
until February 23, 2025
Car les abords d’un secret sont plus secrets que lui-même»: Blanchot, Michel, Le Livre à venir, Paris, Gallimard, 1986, p. 259