Renato Guttuso’s review

I think Carl Timner is a very talented painter. I think even more: Timner is among the very first European artists of his generation. And not only because of the singular position that it occupies on the land that is not very practiced in a strictly objective art, supported by an extraordinary technical ability, but for the non-avant-garde creative root of its objectivity. The problem of objectivity is the central theme of art today. But this objectivity has manifested itself and manifests itself in various aspects. Aspects ranging from the experiences of “Pop”, some years ago, to the use of materials called “poor”, to the most recent, but also past, presentations called “hyper-realists”. None of these aspects, which all fall under the dying avant avant-garde and its presentation methods, based on spectacular fundamentalism, has never even remotely touched Timner.

His objectivism expressed by means of drawing and painting, means that Timner recovers in their specific essence, re-appropriating Renaissance and seventeenth-century concepts that have fallen into disuse or have expired at the level of flat academicism. But the recovery that Timner makes of it belongs to our contemporaneity.

The anatomical precision, the tension of the muscles and nerves, the expression of the faces, the attention to the precision (naturalness) of the movements, even in the apparent normality, express a world that belongs to us, as it is, without expressionistic forcing or other intellectualistic temptations.

The result is, in a clear and firm representation, a true, direct, intense relationship between the artist and his figures. The pages where a figure is repeated several times with some variation in the movement, are indicative of Timner’s extraordinary ability to create a true relationship with his object.
The repetition of the model is never of an academic type, but it is research, a need for a deeper relationship with the model previously faced.

Because of his evidence, clarity, apparent obviousness and absolute verisimilitude, Timner is, in an age of intellectualist and spectacular sophistication like ours, a difficult painter.

This is a sign of its value as well. Timner is searching for the truth, and the truth is hard.