In the Library of babel

Tim Head: Fictions, exh cat., Parafin + Lecturis. London 2014

Within a computer programme the artist manipulates translucent discs of colour, layering them within a carefully calibrated grid structure. The circles move before and behind each other, and their translucency means that complex colour combinations and spatial configurations are generated as they overlap. A rippling, shimmering weave of light and colour permeates a seemingly infinite space. Yet, where are these immaculate coloured structures? They exist only in a conceptual reality, a virtual space, a space where perfect geometric forms can be stacked and layered yet which is ‘virtual’ in its fullest sense, and visible only through the flat, pixelated, glass plane of the computer screen. 

Liberated from the hermetic virtual world of the programme and printed, brought our into the real world, rendered as physical realities, these coloured forms produce a strong sense of pictoral depth. As within the computer, the shapes and colours appear layered. Yet again, this is an illusion, there are no layers, for the printer replicates them as a single layer of ink, a single physical plane of colour. 

Tim Head’s extraordinary new works are about rendering the illusory space of the digital world tangible. Previously Head has used large-scale projections and LED screens to explore the construction of digital space. This continuing body of work is characterised by a kind of ‘truth to materials’ aesthetic in that the works are defined by the technology that the artist uses to make them. In the ‘Fictions’ what appear to be complex layers of colour actually consist of a single layer of ultrafine spots of coloured ink resting on the surface of the acrylic or paper support. There is no literal depth, only illusion. To make them, Head established a spectrum of colours and then developed frameworks for laying down successive sequences of circles. Of course, the circles are not actually layered. The computer calculates the interactions of the different elements - what tones the successive combinations or ‘layers’ of colour will produce - in order to render the artist’s complex structures as a single plane of pixels and/or printed dots. As such, the images could not be made by hand but are the result of machine intelligence and a tightly defined conceptual process. 

Subsequently, having worked with solid colours, Head reduced the circles to outlines. Again, we see the circles (or fragments of circles) lying one on top of each other in space. In fact, they sit together, and are printed together, in a single plane. 

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In his extraordinary story ‘The Library of Babel’, Jorge Luis Borges describes an impossible space, an ‘indefinite and perhaps infinite’ structure, a library, which is also a model of the universe. 

‘The Library of Babel’ was first published in 1941, before the advent of the computer age. Yet, the hermetic universe Borges describes seems to perfectly articulate the seemingly infinite data world of the computer and the internet. 

Tim Head’s new works probe the perfect surfaces of that digital world, articulating the illusion of reality that surrounds us, and Head designates them ‘Fictions’ as they depict spaces that don’t exist. Thus, individual works are named after imaginary places - such as ‘Alphaville’ or ‘Solaris’ - from the worlds of literature 

or cinema. These titles introduce a further layer of possibility, aligning Head’s conceptual structures with the imaginative universes of Borges, Calvino, Tarkovsky and other visionaries. 

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The ubiquity of the screen and the pixel. In 2014 we increasingly view the world through a series of windows which give onto an hermetic airless vacuum which nonetheless contains a seemingly perfect dimensional rendering of reality. Or we spend hours working at fields of flat blank space upon which text appears, both pinned to a virtual plane and floating in an indeterminate space. Yet the pin-sharp definition of these worlds disintegrates into a pixelated construction as we go closer. It is just information. 

The ‘Fictions’ are an extension of Head’s ongoing investigation of the ways that technology articulates our perception. Yet it is worth noting that in these new works he has achieved a striking combination of conceptual rigour and visual seduction. Works such as Solaris or Gravity’s Rainbow evoke the complex Modernist abstractions of Albers, Stella or Riley, or even Pollock or Rothko, and also the chromatic intensity of Matisse, Kandinsky or Bonnard, yet are totally rooted in their digital conception and machine-made physical perfection. 

For more than forty years Tim Head has rigorously tested the fabric of reality that envelops us. From
 his earliest installations using projected photographs and actual mirrors to create psychological spaces, to Pop-inflected investigations of corporate logos and symbols of power, to paintings based on the uncanny textured and patterned surfaces of mass market packaging, Head has articulated our increasingly queasy and unstable relationship with the surfaces of reality. The ‘Fictions’ are a stunning new extension of this vitally important body of work.