The Alchemy of Desire

The Alchemy of Desire - From Red Into Gold

Tim Ruth

Mixed Media on Wood

121 × 48 cm

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Overview

The Alchemy of Desire is a materially charged painting by Tim Ruth, created during a period of profound personal and relational transformation. Working in mixed media on wood, the artist approaches desire not as subject matter alone, but as a generative force—capable of reshaping perception, intention, and reality itself.

The elongated format heightens a sense of movement and imbalance, drawing the viewer into a surface that feels active, intimate, and unresolved.

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Structure, Device, and the Off-Centre Mandala

Using a device developed by the artist specifically for this work, the painting was constructed around an off-centre mandala—a geometry in which the point of convergence appears displaced, sitting far to one side of the composition rather than at its visual centre.

This deliberate asymmetry mirrors the lived experience that informed the work: a destabilisation of familiar reference points, and a reorientation toward a new axis of meaning. Order is present, but it is dynamic rather than static—emerging through tension, movement, and deviation rather than balance alone.

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Material Process and Embodied Making

The surface bears the marks of an intensely physical process. Pigment is layered, pushed, scraped, and reworked directly into the grain of the wood, creating a dense interplay of colour, gesture, and texture. The painting records not only decisions, but states of being—moments of heightened presence, surrender, and attunement.

Much of the work was created in conditions of radical vulnerability and openness, within a relationship grounded in trust, intimacy, and an unguarded relationship to the body. Rather than depicting eroticism, the painting absorbs its energetics—heat, fluidity, friction, and flow—translating them into material form.

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Desire as Alchemical Force

The title refers not to desire as impulse, but as alchemy. In classical alchemical tradition, transformation occurs through sustained attention, heat, and intention—the refinement of base material into something more luminous.

Here, desire functions as a conscious practice: an act of transmutation. The work emerges from an understanding of intimacy as a creative force capable of moving beyond the personal moment—shaping inner states, relationships, and ultimately, perception of the material world itself.

Lead becomes gold not through escape from the physical, but through full immersion in it.

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Presence and Resonance

The Alchemy of Desire invites prolonged looking. Its surface reveals itself gradually, rewarding attention rather than spectacle. It is a work that carries atmosphere—altering the emotional register of the space it inhabits.

For collectors drawn to art that acknowledges the body as a site of knowledge, and intimacy as a catalyst for transformation, this painting offers a rare and uncompromising encounter.

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If you’d like, I can:

Make a *shorter, subtler version** for more conservative audiences

Dial this slightly more *philosophical** or more poetic

* Align it tonally with your sacred-geometry works while preserving its sensual intelligence

But as written, this communicates everything you intend — without saying anything that doesn’t need to be said.