PLEASE BELIEVE THESE DAYS WILL PASS

Mark Titchner has been brightening urban surfaces with his kaleidoscopic patterning and cryptic messages for two decades. A Turner Prize nominee in 2006 his art takes various forms – layered and die-cut illuminated works, sound pieces, giant banners, pulsating lens-based extravagancies, billboards, complex and intriguing installations, kinetic drawings created by screaming voices – but what chiefly characterises his stunningly complex aesthetic is a love of pattern comingled with stark, in-your-face text. Titchner’s exquisitely, crazily arrayed designs are the result of painstaking manipulation of source material found in obscure periodicals, scientific textbooks, 70’s magazine layouts, photography, floral ornament and fragments of previous works. The words are derived from equally diverse origins: messianic self-help screeds, outmoded psychological theory, de-classified CIA manuals... The results beguile, intrigue, mystify, coerce and console. In short they afford a collapsing and questioning of ‘truths’, a practice that seems particularly suited to our times.