Analysis Of Pádraig Timoney By Alessandro Rabottini

Imagine that a fictional, hypothetical, artist from somewhere in Eastern Europe (more specifically, from the Baltic coast of Poland, from the city called Gdańsk) has taken up a teaching job at an American university as a professor in that university's art school. He is a older man, whose work used to be very prominent sometime in the early 1970s, and which remains well respected, often discussed in the lectures and seminars of the art schools of the Western world, is still bought and collected, but is certainly no longer 'current'. He has, perhaps to his credit, gone on saying the same thing for years. In any case, there is something that annoys him about what is sometimes called the rise of the curator, and the thought that however much a curator might respect, treasure, think about or even love works of art, they will
An artist who manifests quite clearly the sensibility of this sort of stylelessness is Pádraig Timoney. His exhibitions, famously, are said to resemble group shows. In a short essay by Alessandro Rabottini this avoidance of recognizable style is described as something the artist practices with 'extreme and paradoxical coherence', achieving a 'radical eclecticism' in presenting works that do not resemble one another. Timoney not only fragments the subjective authority we might expect to find when many of an artist's works are gathered together, but disables the viewer's ability to recognize a subjective thesis in the totality of the works. The exhibition, in fact, becomes an assembly where, according to Rabottini, 'each work as a distinct unit (become) coordinates'. This is according to Rabottini, a way of fragmenting the singular authorship of an artistic practice until it can form a curatorial