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3/8/2007

Ian Francis

BLK/MRKT Gallery, Culver City

Super Coma Fantasy

Living and working in Bristol, England, Francis studied art and illustration, graduating with honors from the University of the West of England (UWE), and has enjoyed tremendous success as a printmaker on the strength of his unique, complex and emotionally profound representational style. Combining elements of popular culture, art historical references, frank sexuality and youthful exuberance, Francis delights in creating whirling, chimerical atmospheres and scenes of savory naughtiness, even as he inserts images and emotions that indict the decadence of both.

Francis’s work explores the chasm between the details of day-to-day life in the real world and the projected fantasies emanating from the world of sex, death, celebrity and imminent destruction concocted by the media. It’s about the trials and tribulations of vapid celebrities, the deluge of pornography and the embarrassing domination of news reports about such puerile frivolity in this time of war and global strife. For this exhibition, Francis set himself the challenge of translating his work into the medium of paint, adding richly textured surfaces, painterly expressivity and luminous pigmentation to his repertory of evocative, surreal and sensual narrative tools.

In his paintings, you might find ink-like blots of blue and purple merging to form the outline of a dress, panty-hosed legs draping subtly over a sidewalk, or building looming in the distance or sideswiping a painting’s edge. As painting drips down the weave of these canvases, Francis’s figural abstractions do much to simultaneously evoke the lost, the found, the nostalgic and the contemporary. In addition to the paintings, a sculptural installation during the exhibition will feature fashion mannequins in poses and attitudes echoing the suspiciously beautiful perennially youthful figures populating his paintings, underscoring the attraction and repulsion to the plastic icons of impossible physical perfection proliferated by commercial mass media.

The exhibition is more than a chance to introduce this promising young talent to American audiences; it is also about the development of his visionary technique and the maturation of his vision that exploits his own faithful, almost hopeful love of serious fine art to inject poetry back into the discourse. In other words, maybe the world is going down the drain, but at least we still have art to comfort us when we wake up with nightmares.

BLK/MRKT Gallery
6009 Washington Blvd. - Culver City

stampa

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