Trevor Winkfield
Paintings 1994 – 2008

Annex Gallery
October 10, 2008 – January 24, 2009

Trevor Winkfield was born in Leeds, England in 1944, and moved to New York in 1969, where he resides to this day.
He paints scenes influenced by Dada, Surrealism, and Pop Art, with hard edged areas in bright flat colors, often of wildly contrasting hues. A different arrangement of the same colors could constitute a seasickness inducing optical attack, but in Winkfield’s hands, the overall effect is often surprisingly harmonious. His classical looking profiles and distorted
perspective bring to mind De Chirico with Pop Art pizzazz.

Something about Winkfield’s paintings seems to prod critics to approach them as visual/literary puzzles or codes. What’s the meaning of these little repeating pears, locks, fish, bells, tomatoes, the letter “V,” links of chain (just for example), and other sundry rhythmic bric-a-brac ricocheting around Winkfield’s paintings? Critics have had some marginal success in “decoding” these images, but the overall effect is of being in the presence of a code without the key. Which must be just how the painter wants it, given his predilection for puzzles, and stated admiration for such a seriously puzzling artist as Marcel Duchamp.

Critics have noted the trademark combination of British drollery and New York energy in Winkfield’s visual style. The overall effect of this could be either upbeat or poignant depending on one’s temperament (and caffeine intake). If the paintings have a poignancy about them it must come from the contrast between the somber expressions of his figures and their zany surroundings, like philosophers trapped in a carnival. Even their bodies are built up precariously of odd parts, like machines. Then again, this can also be read as a bit of self deprecating humor regarding the human condition, especially our particular modern-day human condition, with all its mechanized hustle and bustle.

Winkfield’s works often have a literary connotation, for example his painting The Poet, a meditation (or spoof?) on the practice of writing. In fact Winkfield is a writer and poet as well as a painter. In the painting the poet writes in a notepad with a spear that sprouts an ear of corn, as a small bird flies in the window carrying an envelope sealed with red wax. The spirit of inspiration perhaps? There is as much food for the metaphorically minded as there is a feast for the eyes, as Winkfield’s repeating shapes fall into catchy rhythms, setting up the viewer for a visual pinball game, and his colors set one another off in unexpected yet pleasing ways.