In Transit
Juan Francisco Rueda
Ni de lejos cerca (By far near) is the title of this exhibition by Timsam Harding. Beyond the wordplay, beyond the phrase’s paradoxical condition, the four words that compose Ni de lejos cerca perhaps reveal, unconsciously on the artist’s part, the unavoidable corporeal dimension of his work, the evocation of a changing place in the world, the certainty of knowing oneself and situating oneself in space through the experience of different phenomena perceived through different senses. In fact, Timsam’s poetics possess a strong perceptual component. Speed, sound, vibration and temperature are sensations linked to his work and make us discover ourselves as perceptive subjects through sight, hearing and touch. In this way, Timsam enunciates the body in a multi-sensory manner, even softening the ocular-centric paradigm of our civilisation.
An artist who has long reflected on sound and its sculptural transformation, in Ni de lejos cerca Timsam begins from his recognisable stainless steel structures. These function as post minimalist resonance chambers for sonic material reproduced through integrated loudspeakers. The recordings lead us unmistakably toward the road, toward vehicular traffic that we hear and physically feel reverberating through our bodies. The road also appears visually and metonymically through the sculptural oleanders, the shrub species planted along its margins, which from within these frameworks respond to sound through vibration. Nevertheless, these structures now undergo a variation. They become mobile altarpieces with folding doors. If movement, recalling the allusion to the road, already existed within Timsam’s imaginary, it now becomes effective in these new works, which rest on the floor or occupy the walls ready to be manipulated, their panels opened and closed in order to access what they shelter inside. This introduces an unquestionable phenomenological dimension into his works, which we encounter and understand through different senses, such as sight and touch, as well as through the spatial relationship we establish with them. We open them by moving aside their panels in order to access another space beyond. Or, put differently, we cross that visual and physical boundary, transformed into a threshold, in order to move toward another place and another disposition.
The doors of these mobile altarpieces or shrines become a kind of vegetal lattice in which the oleanders configure a mesh, a barrier like those found along highways. Once these doors are opened, we encounter the sound of the road or the blurred image of a landscape photographically registered from within the automobile. The author of these lines cannot escape the words of Timsam himself in Acto-Recuerdo-Sentido-Experiencia, a text written in 2025 for his exhibition at La Térmica. In it he evokes the constant interposition of barriers and obstacles that nevertheless always manage to be overcome:
“With the help of the post, it becomes easier to climb over the fence, that fine metal mesh that cages the motorways. A few steps later, after crossing the row of oleanders and reaching the roadside ditch, we come face to face with the guardrail, that final barrier enclosing the vehicles. Only one leap remains before the asphalt, a leap that is not as small as expected and surprises with its height. On either side, the line of crash barriers dissolves into the horizon. We begin to walk. We want to find a place to paint and the night is already far advanced.”
Timsam’s narrative is profoundly phenomenological, since we can physically feel this continual displacement of the body and the overcoming of these frontiers. Our gesture of approaching the altarpieces, opening them and discovering the road sonically and visually seems to replicate it. Fence, mesh, cage, oleanders, ditch, guardrail, trench or crash barriers. Obstacles for the body and, in some cases, for vision, although they do not restrain the sound of transit and travel. Sheltered within these altarpieces lies the road. We hear it, we feel how it reverberates within us, how it vibrates. Or we see the landscape from it through photographs that transmit the dynamism of driving, with the landscape deformed by speed. The word vibrate, from the Latin vibrare, means to shake rapidly, to tremble or to reverberate. Some altarpieces vibrate through sound, while Timsam’s photographs, technically blurred through motion, reveal the agitation of transit itself. And we, subjected to the perceptual journey upon which Timsam embarks us, find ourselves in transit, experiencing through touch, sight and hearing, between the object, those oleanders occupying the doors, and the photographic image, that undefined and diffused nature, perhaps a resonance of the former, between geometric structures and vegetal filigree, between the non place of the road and the powerful forms of these altarpieces that evoke the history of art.
Within this transit we find ourselves alongside Timsam.