Tarantula, 2020
Tomas Harker revisits stories of the past. An emerging artist based in the UK, Tomas recontextualizes imagery culled from classical paintings and found photographs, obscuring or altering parts of the original works to create a new, uncanny experience.
Tomas Harker’s works address the nature of meaning in conditions of mediated experience and hyperreal saturation. Over the last several years, the artist’s practice has increasingly blurred the lines between fairytale and reality, often by subtly manipulating notions of the uncanny. The mythologies leaking into his recent works are not simply an exploration of fantasy, however; rather, they act as a point of entry to the abstract network of thoughts through which they come into being, suggesting that a real-world circumstance is not quite what it seems.
Existing on the fringes of popular culture, Harker's practice often draws from a variety of image production and distribution systems in an attempt to make sense of a cosmic order becoming increasingly disordered. His paintings reflect the increasing murkiness and confusion of contemporary life, whilst remaining mindful of the dynamics of power benefiting from uncertainty. In spite of their relationship to complex, significant systemic and social issues, Harker’s work manages to retain a lightness of touch, a sense of irreverence, through the inclusion of mythical aesthetics. Unlike magical realism, however, his paintings act as thought experiments – providing the viewer with material by which interpretative systems can be created. They insist that we move beyond defined aesthetic language and into a mode of thinking capable of establishing connections between disparate chunks of metaphor, reference and symbolism as a means of better understanding the physical sensations capable of dominating experience, opinion and existence. Harker's works therefore venture into a new realm, where representations of the unreal are presented as symbols, or emissaries, of alternate understandings.