VIB-RA-FON


What does it mean, Vib-ra-fon?  Our brains automatically compute notions of vibration, a vibe, or pulsating and resonating energy – a definition confirmed when standing in font of one of Tony Twigg’s most recent works. But when we pick up the dictionary, no such word exists.

Twigg explains it as, “…a thing that moves between positive and negative, that is something that contains its own echo.”  An abstraction on many levels, these works flutter in a place caught between play, sensuality and serious consideration. They prick these emotions within us, drawing us into an active participation in their optical game as we move across the measured length of their surfaces.

Continuing from Twigg’s “Expanded discs”, previously shown in Singapore and Manila, this new group of constructions uses the same foundation - a circle stretched through linear space. But in these forms Twigg is more acutely alert to the way we read the object. It is an extremely astute conversation between positive and negative space, pushing and pulling our eye through a set of complex spatial relationships within a given form.

Looking across this exhibition, we can recognise the action of an accordion as the form is compressed and expanded into discreetly stacked lines. The small “Vib-ra-fon Study 5” (2009), for example, is expanded to "Vib-ra-fon: Resonator" (2009), gasping for air and reaching like tendrils across the gallery wall, corralling ‘whiteness’ within its form. Increasingly the work is about itself – an abstraction – rather than the stacked urban references, such as Singapore’s skyline or discarded shipping palettes that have coloured Twigg’s constructions over recent years.

Vib-ra-fon is an optical show.  While there has been a resurgence of Op art with the proliferation of digital technology and global design that has been disseminated across Asia from the 1990s through to this millennium, Twigg’s charge is harder to pin down. It is without reference.

The kind of optical shift that we experience across his constructions makes for an enigmatic object. The form becomes illusive, caught between the positive and negative.  Take for example the hanging, incomplete lines in the construction “Expanding disc: Electroglide” (2009), which seemingly reach out to connect with an adjacent vertical column.  In doing so, Twigg allows the outside and inside space to join.  While defined tightly within their ovoid, there is an energetic chaos within, a drama if you like, illuminated by its electric blue surface.

This shift in energy is perhaps best illustrated in “Vi-bra-fon” (2009), a construction that can be flipped into two spatial arrangements. Twigg has used the flat edge of milled branches, placing them perpendicular to the surface of the painting so that, when painted in a deep red hue, they become bold defining lines. Standing to the side of this work these lines are compressed, shrinking physical space as if its armature is folding in on itself. And yet, as the viewer moves around the work from left to right it opens with lightness and energy. It is a sensorial experience that leads to our understanding of Twigg’s notion that these works ‘hold their own echo’.

As always with Twigg’s work, his surfaces complete the construction. They are impossible to reproduce or repeat. Built up by dozens of thin washes of enamel paint that allow the natural quality of the wood to breath life into the form through its grain, they also have a velveteen quality as the paint pools on the flat baffles of plywood. Twigg has introduced sawdust to some of the surfaces, texturing them and fusing the organic with the manipulated veneer.

Twigg explains, “The painting is accidental insofar as the way the paint sits on the surface or runs off. It is the intersection of gravity and the 2-dimensional plane and it is beyond my control.”  He continues, “Rather than trying to employ a certain colour or perceived outcome, it is a process of finding the colour within the form – its pitches, troughs and the vibration it dictates.” 

This delicate marriage between surface texture, gravity and pigment is beautifully illustrated in the construction, “Expanded disc: Flutes” (2009), visceral undertones, muted and transmuted in complete harmony. It has the same kind of strength of a single chord from a cello – resonant and sure.

This is the core of this exhibition Vi-bra-fon; that below its surface energy and seduction is a very even consideration. Twigg explains that each work is built upon a horizontal - a line drawn on the studio wall that holds the individual vertical elements in a kind of stasis as their relationship with one another is slowly animated as he builds the form through the addition and subtraction of elements. It is a geometric aid that acts to neutralise the form so that when a shift is made it can be seen. Twigg explains, “I have to get it quiet enough so I can hear what the form is saying.” 

It is like the lowest vibration of a bass stereo, slowly animated into melody. Vib-ra-fon is a deeply mature understanding of abstraction and its spatial pulse.

-Gina Fairley