The fall and wake of Tim Finnegan 2005

Tomas Maldonado made this colour composition, its title alluding to the fictional character Tim Finnegan, whose fall and wake are celebrated in a popular Irish ballad. The painting is divided horizontally into two fields of orange and yellow, containing rectangles. The blocks of colour, and the sharp black lines which border each shape, are like elements or letters in a visual language. The artist has to choose where to put them. The rectangles are not quite centered and give the painting an asymmetrical composition. The blocks are separated into neat stripes of colour, like threads of yarn laid side by side. What might the artist have been thinking when they made it? I can imagine them working slowly and methodically, weighing out each colour block and each stripe, calculating the visual weight of each element. The question of language in art is central to the work of many painters, each with their own unique visual vocabulary.