Footnotes

• PROVENANCE
  Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
  Private collection, Melbourne
  Australian & International Paintings, Deutscher~Menzies, Melbourne, 26 November 2003, lot 25
  Private collection, Melbourne
  
  EXHIBITED
  Spring: Sensational Paintings, Tolarno Galleries at the Holmes à Court Gallery, Perth, 1 September – 1 October 2000
  
  Tim Maguire is represented by Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne.
  
  The quince, close cousin to the apple and pear, has proven a rich motif throughout the history of western painting, and in particular, within the Dutch vanitas style of the 16th and 17th centuries. Intended as reminders of the transience of life, the futility of pleasure and the certainty of death, the quince itself is associated with marriage, fertility though also bitterness with their flesh hard and inedible. Like the vanitas theme which preoccupied the Dutch, here Tim Maguire displays fruit which concurrently has a real and metaphysical value. We are beguiled and seduced whilst the painting simultaneously generates meaning beyond the exact realism of its subject. Immersive in their cinematic scale and technical achievement, Maguire's diptych paintings shift our focus from the subject of the painting to the object itself. The composition, neatly divided at its centre into two canvas panels, results in a tension between the subject, and the contemporary notion of the painting as subject itself.
  
  As though it has been taken from a colour plate reproduction, the arrangement of quince, oranges and peel, is cropped to the brink of abstraction. With an abiding interest in the dichotomy between production and reproduction, between the contemporary and the historic, Maguire shifts his subject in and out of focus, leaving an overwhelming sensation of beauty but also disquiet. We are presented with a detail made monumental, but the whole is concealed or perhaps ultimately an illusion, like painting itself.