Trevor WinkfieldWhere Angels Tread With Passports Trevor Winkfield juxtaposes, with impeccable neatness, strangely familiar characters and patterned surfaces. He assembles the cryptic elements of disordered dreams with our fractured memories of wonderful children's book illustrations. Winkfield's English upbringing shows in this fairy-tale quality. Quixotic facial expressions and the puzzle of disparate elements conjure up more mystery than solutions. The canvas becomes a battlefield where normalcy is violated and pierced to the netherest regions of our formerly suppressed, now unstoppable imaginations. This is where, in our daily attempts to be civil, we fearfully avoid meandering to. His is a land of defiant symmetry and silly, wacky associations that won't get us to work on time. There is some reassurance from the familiar (i.e., mushrooms pacify knives) but the presentation is an almost violent phrasing. Luckily, in spite of their kitchen knives, wayward cartoon fantasy, and serial danger, the canvases are quite fetching in their crafty and crisp collage effects. Their disordering is done in bold and clean terms. Winkfield's palette vibrates with exotica from Persian turquoise to Parisian teal, yet he maintains a warmth and consistency usually limited to pastels. He manages with virtuosity to flatten his images and compositions into a kaleidoscopic cubism. (SAY, April 1986) |