Teodoruk x Tomkins | Apology

Blending the vibrant spontaneity of street art, with echoes of pop art and neo-
expressionist verve, the collaborative works of Sidney Teodoruk and Neil Tomkins
present as an open gesture of goodwill. The gesture comes from two intimately
connected hands, where vulnerability and painterly bravado, come together to
celebrate friendship, painting, and the rhythm of life unfolding and enfolding us in
unpredictable but altogether delightful ways.

In this series of paintings two lexicons collide as the artists bring a sense of play
and a sprinkle of chaos into a painterly game of gesture and erasure. With each
artist alternately working on the same canvas, receiving and complicating the
painterly offering of the other. The game relies on bold moves and nuanced
negotiations that risk collapsing the canvas into incomprehensibility. The reward
is that in its final resolution, each work holds in its layers of paint, the memory of
its own creation and the dramaturgically charged exchange between two
differently tinted philosophical and aesthetic ways of being, knowing and painting.
Naomi Lee McCarthy
Arts Writer and Doctoral Researcher,
Western Sydney University and The University of Cambridge, UK