LandEscape Art Review | Page 98

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
22