Painting and a World in Formation

People walking towards a remote centre, pointing at something far away, examining mysterious objects, peering into the depth. Populated by these peculiar searchers, Christopher Orr’s work deals with our own quest for understanding — as spectators of the very painting we are looking at, of art in general, and in the end, of the whole world and its physical and psychological complexities. It is our own desire for analytical comprehension that is being mimicked or, better said, elevated to another level of yearning: to fathom and thus to connect with the ambiguous atmosphere that surrounds us — represented by an inner and outer landscape that the artist constructed as an amalgam of elements of nostalgic reality and loaded fiction.  

Christopher Orr’s paintings are manifestations off something that is not there and never has been, but could be if our logic of perception could be transformed into a more holistic approach. They are collages of the abstract and the figurative, of past memories as well as the mundane present. These different elements, visual remnants of the artist’s rambling search and research process in various media and from picture sources, form an intrinsic collage of disproportionate and incongruous scenarios. As an accumulation of existing visual imagery, of figures, gestures, sensations, histories taken from a whole variety of contexts, it represents a pastiche of ambiguities bound together by the tonality of both the paintings’ surface and their inner attitude.

Driven by an interest in capturing the post-modern human condition, Christopher Orr absorbs and incorporates all sorts of existing ‘loaded’ source material and imagery through an accumulation of fragments of reality and vision, of the factual and the fictional. The possibility of binding together the utterly mundane with the eternal sublime, the minuscule molecule with the vastness of space, the individual perception of the solitary figure with the overall sentiment of mankind creates not only a vast area of formal possibilities, but an ongoing painterly experiment of integration and redefinition of visual imagery and its emotional potential.

While the figures inhabiting Christopher Orr’s paintings seem to be everyday, practical, middle-class people dressed in a nondescript, slightly nostalgic way, calmly performing rather mundane activities, in contrast nature, the environment, the world that surrounds them is emotionally highly charged, extravagant, supernatural, comprising an iconography of the natural sublime with effects of light, colour and depth. This essentially creates a dichotomy between the objective, positivistic, analytic, and the subjective, formable, perceptive. The people within his painterly worlds seem to be equipped with a certain naive belief in being able to decipher or examine something that simply cannot be understood.

Christopher Orr’s paintings are small, even compared to old master standards. Unlike the usual large scale of his contemporary colleagues, this emphasis on a small format makes his canvases whisper — as if in a dialogue with someone who lowers their voice in an attempt to increase the concentration and attention of the listener. The intimacy of the small format is an integral part of the overall impact of the work, it makes the work accessible, it invites the spectator to scrutinise the surface, to enter into the formal dialogue, to come close, very close, and to focus on the different elements of the painting, the objects, the colours, the textures of the canvas.

But beyond what catches the eye when looking at the canvas, Christopher Orr’s works carry in them an even deeper density, a history, not merely of thoughts and process, but of colours, figures, motifs which he initially applied during the formative process of the painting, purpose— fully overloading the canvas surface. By then scraping off and removing elements during the formation of the work the artist is not reducing the complexity but rather — like an archaeologist or geologist — working backwards through different levels of sediment, creating a readable image of time, evolution and. meaning. Similar to each other in the way that vintage photographs are, Christopher Orr’ 5 paintings carry in them effects of faded memory, of foggy remembrance, of effects that derive from the techniques of artistic production, but that are then being deciphered as an emotional component, a psychic state of the work.

Over the course of his artistic development Christopher Orr’s paintings have become even more diverse, more loaded, more populated. With this, their colouring, the various dimensions of the figures, the multilayered imagery, the grid structures have developed into complex, figurative elements — less narrative or chronological, and more abstract and loaded with a painterly discourse, with a picture plane consisting of many traces, fragments, fade outs, double exposures, shadowlike afterthoughts. In the end it is the painting itself that represents different states of being and a complex spiritual/spatial environment.