Tim Braden: Chère Tante Hanneke

The title of this exhibition ‘Chère Tante Hanneke,’ combines French and Dutch language in the form of the start of a letter, a classic stylistic device from fiction. Like all of Branden’s work the title undermines categorisation in favour of opening up tangential hints of other people, places and times.
 
In the front space of the gallery are two large sculptures made from painted steel of outsize playground toys, their bright colours, faded, and steel, rusted. Objects Branden describes as simultaneously evocative and ignorable – versions of the kind of shapes you see everyday, but are very hard to recall accurately. These sculptures don’t refer to real animals or airplanes, but to other toys. Their scale in ‘wrong’ only because no child could sit on them comfortably not because airplanes are much bigger in real life.
 
A painting based on a plan of a former holiday camp for navel cadets, is propped up against the wall on two rusty metal legs, while a video monitor shows film captured on super-8 of a girl running through a forest.
 
In the second room, what looks like a large handmade wooden school blackboard is painted with the name ‘Marie’ and a suggestion of a colour theory chart.
 
In the backspace the installation ‘Looking at ballet’ incorporates a large painting on canvas of ballerinas, a small watercolour of a family group watching from a theatre box, and a series of drawings on paper called ‘Attempts to draw a ballerina’s hand in the dark with a carpenter’s pencil’. The drawings were made while watching the ballet focussing on the gestures of the dancers’ hands from the very back of a theatre.
 
Braden’s subject is the problem of remembering and keeping track of those small epiphanies when one really sees something for the first time; all his work is unified by a desire to avoid constraints of correct scale or colour, to return to a formative approach to his visual memory. This translates into works, and an entire exhibition, that aims to encourage the viewer to look at the world and the things in it in a more direct, associative ways.
 
A book will be published to accompany this exhibition with an essay by Dan Fox and texts by Michael Ignatieff and Malcolm Lowry.