John Slyce

I borrowed the title for this essay from an entry I noticed in one of Christopher Orr's sketchbooks he showed me in his South London studio. Orr came into contact with the phrase, I suspect, while listening to the darkly subdued and delicately hypnotic song by the same title performed by the band Low and then filed it away for uses other than my own. I was first drawn to the phrase 'time is the diamond' while thinking through what I found to be the jewel-like character of his new series of paintings. The initial fit between the phrase and a quality I find links these works owes not to the fact they are diminutive or even precious, but that they sensuously attract the attention of the eye and hand as much as the imagination. This they are and certainly do.

For me, the phrase 'time is the diamond' resonates with a growing appreciation of a quality in Orr's paintings that is perhaps more illusive and has to do with the workings of time and its image. Time is the crucial coefficient brought to the forces of heat and compression, which transforms carbon to its allotrope in the diamond. Contained within is something shared and common to every stone: a past. And yet captured as well within such a precious stone is time transformed as it relates not only to its own past and composition, but possesses a description of facets of a future to be unlocked in projections at once both real and imagined. The richly complex and condensed space of Christopher Orr's painting is, for me, similarly formed and contains properties relating to time in and through an image that settles into a collaged place amongst the materiality of painting.

When I visited Christopher Orr in his studio the paintings reproduced in this book, shown in the pages following this text, were all on the go and in various stages of completion with their titles still to be determined. There is a significant archival impulse to Orr's practice of painting and his studio houses an impressive collection of National Geographic magazines stretching from the 1930s to the 1970s. These are an equally important source of inspiration and a resource for his painting just as are certain works, or more precisely, certain details within paintings made by Tiepolo, Frans Hals, Vermeer or Bosch. Perhaps of even more weight and value in appreciating his practice is a collection of images that range across a number of sources and decades of the twentieth-century filed into plastic sleeves held in two-ring binders. These Orr has culled and arranged according to a visual and conceptual logic of his own, devising groupings that generate mystery and surprise nonetheless. Here, a page is organised around spheres, bubbles, time rounded stones, a child holding a blue ball or a scientist examining an atomic model. Others pages gather post-war found family photos and holiday snaps alongside mid-seventies advertisements from weekend supplements. Colour often lends a sense of logic or a shared visual rhythm to these groupings. These are the super-saturated hues of Kodachrome marked by their own look and visual time code.

This analogue archive supports a bank of images and the material Orr edits, orders and alters, often first in a sketchbook, as he maps out the shape of a painting, and at other times, arresting a detail or an isolated fragment from an old master's work in painted sketches, each with their own compelling atmospheric intensity, on large sheets of oiled paper. Drawing is an important element within Orr's practice, yet it is a type of drawing carried out with a brush rather than with pencil or pen and ink. These tools and media are reserved for a more direct handling and isolation of a selected image fragment as they allow material to be lifted from its original context and painted into another. This is an act and practice that bears a close relation to that of paper collage, or filmic montage as a new image forms against the ground of another in a move that is equal parts coalescence and collision. An exclusive focus on Orr's painted canvases will ignore a hugely rich area of his wider production, all of which is drawn with a brush. In Orr's studio I saw a largely abstract and beautiful painting on canvas well underway that bridges these areas of production. The origin of its make-up was taken largely from a blotter on Orr's desk, which receives drawings, and graphic, or typographic excursions and doodles while he listens to music or speaks on the phone. To my mind, this is an important work that in its own making suggests future directions.

 All that I have touched on thus far is, in a sense, essential to Christopher Orr's practice and yet still very much part of the pre-production, or pre-history of a painting. In a respect, one may relate to Orr's paintings as excavated and product of a dialectic structured by building up as much as removing material. This is the case in the editing and ordering of source material as it is in the handling of and transformation of the image in paint. The removal of painted material, as in his use of glazes, isolates focal points within the picture and develops highlights in these intensely scaled and detailed fragments painted whole. The new works here - whilst engaged in a palette and atmospheric perspective at once Baroque in execution and equally evincing a condensed version of the dramatic painterly effects of a Turner - belong entirely to Orr, while departing from his work of recent years more firmly located in the rendering of figuration, image and sign.

Nature remains a primary subject for Orr, but perhaps here his handling of such material clarifies its earlier function within his work. Much art production has operated through a sleight of hand, or feint which confuses culture for nature or, with no less effect, slides in the opposite direction. In these new paintings, nature is positioned as ground against which one may identify and read culture and that of its image in a totality, which is to say - a whole way of life. Smoke and clouds, culled and collected in turns from his own Super 8 films to 1950s snaps and encyclopaedic images of geysers are handled with equal reverence and fidelity to the blue skies and heavenly stuff of an old master. Christopher Orr's gift and practice is in the handling and painting of time — or, something small and intense, which relates to something bigger and functions as a means of exploring and imagining another tomorrow. If time is the diamond, well all right.