C.T. Main is a recently discovered Outsider Artist with a fascinating and still unfolding Walter Mitty-esque back story. C.T. grew up in Wales, the North East of England and Northern Ireland and his story is replete with profound psychosocial difficulties, instances of LGBT persecution and prolonged periods of homelessness and destitution.
C.T. Main remarkably, is now in demand and an artist with impending international reputation.
The plan is to exhibit in London and York in 2020, to coincide with the broadcast of “Mr Main” a documentary about his life, struggles and art. He will then exhibit at Paris and New York Outsider Art Fair in 2021.
Through his unique visual language, C.T. introduces us, with acerbic wit, to a ghastly yet beguiling panoply of the living and the dead; mortal and Minotaur. His work offers up an veritable Camelot of sexually animated “creature-raze” (“creatures”), slipping and snarling effortlessly between the binary habitats of the ineffable real and the realer still. In his paintings there exists a potent strain of the Celtic hiraeth that has for so long haunted the Welsh imagination.
Relentlessly threatened by our sense of security , C.T.’s “creature-raze” are almost exclusively rendered in the harsh, forensic half-light of destruction and detonation, as they rail against the complacency of humankind, making stateless glimpses of transfiguration all the more affecting, for, beyond such dark orgiastic visions, a familiar yet airy calm descends, like a homecoming after the storm. Birds begin to sing once again and caught in the glare of their heightened awarenessreality, all species seem to coexist as if suspended in a perfect explosive solution.
