We speak with Tom Otway about his vibrant, optical paintings in his latest exhibition at Ginnie on Frederick Gallery.
There is a phenomenon in the botanical world where a diseased plant uses all its strength to produce its most beautiful blossoms and shoots just before it dies. The name for this is ‘panic bloom.’ It’s the frantic uprising of an organism against its own demise, an insistence on flourishing in the face of decay. This concept is transferable to contexts outside of the natural world, too: economists have identified panic blooming on the stock, housing and commodity markets. Prices soar and bubbles form not as a symptom not of a healthy system, but a broken one.
Jack Otway’s meticulous paintings follow a similar logic to the panic bloom: they are hyper-seductive surfaces that betray an underlying sense of threat.
To learn more about Jack Otway and to see available work please copy and paste this link:
gertrude.com/artists/jack-otway