Toby Rainbird: One Thing May Hide Another

The tendency of Toby’s paintings to extend outwards into the quotidian surfaces of the world is reflected in his wider practice as an artist, which similarly reaches out into curating and writing (through the independent platform, Lee Scully, he co-runs with artist Tabby Li). In his studio at the University of Brighton, where Toby is the Freelands Studio Fellow, paintings from before the fellowship began share space with new and ongoing works, their ideas rejuvenated and carried through in recent paintings. 

The works discussed in this essay occupied Toby’s studio in Brighton throughout the fellowship: they were either begun there, arrived half-finished, or formed the basis of new works produced in that environment. In this way, Toby’s engagement with the peripherally viewed encompasses this quality of recuperation in his work; the development of his practice is something that occurs, rather than being planned, as he puts it. Part of his time in Brighton has involved researching, planning and co-curating, again with Tabby Li, the exhibition Cahoots, which features both alumni from the University of Brighton and artists connected to Freelands Foundation. Toby’s background in museums, DIY music and grassroots curation continually draws him towards the exchange of ideas, creative community and the facilitation of conversation. 

Toby’s work is energised by the serendipitous or casual observation. Fender, for instance, is a painting of a fence behind a fence, interlocking like fingers against undulating waves of greenish-blue. What seems re-enacted in the painting is a blip in perception, in which two peripheral phenomena make a sudden rhyme. Your train is unexpectedly stalled in the middle of nowhere and as it rolls to its rest it locks the visual world in place, if only for a short while, and only for an eye that cares to notice. The painting feels like a dramatisation of that kind of encounter, and the use of oil paint thickened with marble dust intensifies it. This is a practice often to be found in his work, in which canvas strips are applied on top of already painted canvas surfaces, delaying the resolution of the painting’s pattern.

I’m reminded, too, of Kenneth Koch’s poem ‘One Train May Hide Another’, which resonates in the company of Toby’s painting:

"In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
…
Internal tracks pose dangers too: one memory
Certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about,
The eternal reversed succession of contemplated entities ..."

(Kenneth Koch, ‘One Train May Hide Another’, The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch, Knopf, New York, 2007, p441).

This relays what’s poetic about Toby’s paintings, and maybe what’s poetic about poetry, in essence. Koch frames memory as a kind of piling-on of thoughts, an endless superimposition of observations and encounters. In Toby’s hands, this translates into a physical practice. His paintings imbue the basic facts of the job of making something in a studio (especially one situated alongside students and faculty), with some of the quality of the way memory and perception interlock in human experience. They do so with a heightened intensity that holds you still, like the viewer from the train window noticing the unexpected harmony of things. What results is a painting practice that marshals the stuff of studio practice and engrossed materiality into a mode of thinking through the textures of human experience.

In Shiny Happy, two vertical bands of colourful square tiles – perhaps the design on the wall of a bus station or fast-food outlet – are interrupted by the fall of a rounded shadow, like a ball or a balloon or a human head. One thing that happens, as a result, is a Josef Albers-style optical comparison: the shaded colours are transformed by the shift in light, taking on an unexpected luminosity. It’s as if Toby wants us to notice the weave of strokes that constitute its surface; to retrace, however accurately, the history of its making as we look. Slowed and thickened, the visual world is subject to a mode of attention that calls back to painting’s basic work: to make something visible, or in Toby’s case, more visible, more present. His paintings are like a tap on the shoulder. Look at this, look at this!

Making-visible might be Toby’s preoccupation. It’s about not only bringing to attention those intermediary surfaces that hover at the edge of perception but also staging painterly events that are themselves about showing or revealing something. I’m reminded of the many swept-aside curtains in the history of painting, the way revelation becomes a repeated dramatic theme. Or, in a painting Toby recently saw in its original location, Jacopo Tintoretto’s Presentation of the Virgin, which hangs halfway up the wall of the church of Madonna dell'Orto, in Venice. Tintoretto’s single canvas was originally two, and acted as shutters for the church organ; long after the artist’s death, it was stitched together into a single canvas, but you imagine its functional origin as appealing to Toby’s interest in the material fabric of public life. In the painting, a staircase shaped a little like a curved ziggurat swoops upwards; figures, in the artist’s typically contorted, athletic attitudes, are dispersed on various steps, leading you up to the child towards its summit. The staircase is speckled with light, like a colander held up to a lightbulb. The effect is to make it the main event of the painting, which in a city of relentless stairs (up and down bridges, or within interior spaces) enables the viewer to imagine the experience of urban movement as inflected with divine potential. Or, at the very least, visual interest, a way of estranging everyday perception. Toby’s paintings are within this lineage: this is what they do, too. 

Toby’s Lightkeep is divided into four dark areas that radiate outwards to the edges of the canvas from a central hub, which looks like an aerial view of a pyramid. Each of these areas is densely worked, with throbs of radiance just visible beneath the darkened surface. The lines that divide them are themselves built up of short streaks of hot colour. The sense of something kept under wraps is surely compounded by the painting’s strange title, that evokes its ability to hold painted radiance in check: to keep hold of light. The strips of canvas laid diagonally across its surface, which come to visibility only after a few moments of attention, seem to have something to do with this quality of containment too.

What’s at stake here is the possibilities of painting as a medium. Toby’s painting practice reiterates the canvas support through repeated horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines, as a way of insisting upon the limitations of the medium and its restricted ability to speak much beyond the dimensions of its own objecthood. And yet within that, the glimpses of colour – seen here within a similarly rectilinear, grid-like structure to his railings, fences, walls and boundaries – hint at some redeeming element, or maybe a flash of something destabilising, within the meshes of ordinary experience.

Koch again: 

"… It
can be important
To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there."

(Kenneth Koch, ‘One Train May Hide Another’, The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch, Knopf, New York, 2007, p441).