Ian Francis "Fireland"
March 3 to April 2, 2011 Joshua Liner Gallery
"Joshua Liner Gallery is pleased to present Fireland, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by the British artist Ian Francis. This is Francis’ first one-man show at the gallery and marks his solo debut in New York.
Working in mixed media on canvas, Ian Francis combines abstraction, figuration, and elements of both painting and drawing to create distinctly contemporary works. His robust approach uses a range of techniques including acrylic, oil, charcoal, ink and graphite, all deployed in a spontaneous, seemingly off-the-cuff manner. Below this active “surface,” however, are subtle notes of melancholy, alienation and social critique, revealing a nuanced regard for contemporary mores.
Francis draws inspiration and raw material from cinema, pornography, street culture, and images sampled from the Internet, synthesizing these sources into a quasi-literal vision of the “mediated” landscape. Among the exhibition’s mixed-media paintings and selection of works on paper, a number depict urban street life and the complex interactions that occur when random souls collide. Amid high-color washes and jagged brushwork, youthful figures have a reckoning on park steps in A Boy Returns Home Not Realizing How Much He’s Changed. The cityscape is fragmented and unsettling in Walking Down a Street a Person is Crushed by Light, a poignant work that intimates the hardships faced by the elderly and other vulnerable beings among urban dwellers."
Ian Francis is one of my current favorite painters/illustrators and soon will be an interview at Audiopleasures
