LandE scape
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
Josh Foley
Lives and works in Launceston, Tasmania- Australia
An artist ' s statement
P redominately the texture represented in my images is an illusion and the paintings surfaces are actually flat. This is not evident if the viewer cannot observe them
in the space that they hang. This trompe l’ oeil( trick of the eye) that I work with is not to deceive but to confuse the haptic expectations and bodily position of the audience. I want to disrupt the usual relationships that someone viewing a painting has to create a schism within their mind and in turn the corporeal reality they are situated in. Easel based painting is the material, perceptual and philosophical heart of my art practice. I’ ve become increasingly focused upon ways to meaningfully frame and dissect through painting the substance of our resource dependant, technologically novel digital age. I see parametric painting, a term I use to describe my current painting ideas and methods, as a way to do this. Parametrics are algorithms’ generated to describe surfaces. I have been influenced by and have studied a number of contemporary artists who I believe also make parametric paintings, some of whom are, from England; Glenn Brown, Richard Patterson( who resides in the US) and William Daniels, from the US;( Argentina born) Fabian Marcaccio, from Belgium; Stephan Balleux( who resides in Berlin) from South America; Adriana Varejao and from Australia; Amanda Marburg and Megan Walch. Inspiration for my creative work comes from( deep breath): film, digital media, colour theories, psychology( especially perceptual psychology), sexuality, music, theatre, sculpture, philosophy, post-colonialism, literature, theology, Chinese philosophy and opera, the unconscious, dreams, neuroscience, performance, painting, mythology, science and science fiction, the environment( physical, meta-physical, technological) and objects, places and people around me. Currently, my work celebrates and parodies the advancements in painting made by postimpressionism, modernism and postmodernism while exploring, analysing, and manipulating the conventions of western painting. I depict paint and the various ways of applying it to a substrate like any other phenomenological object and play with both modernist ideas of flatness, contemporary concerns with material, texture, surface and renaissance principles of space; reconciling these elements or contrasting them against each other in intentionally jarring ways. Paint is by nature and definition a mutable substance and it continually suggests to me analogous forms, materials, cultures, territories and patterns.
Josh Foley
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