To paint in the 21st century is to take up a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down by contemporary new media: this is not photography, not video, not digitized production.  Painting is work by hand, the direct making of marks on a ground. The three artists whose works pulsate and enliven this exhibition are each deeply engaged in acts of translation. What they have experienced, have seen and envisioned, is filtered through gesture, colour sensitivity and meditative acts.  Like a force of nature leaving traces of its presence, gesture becomes painted mark—visible, material, an object with a life of its own.

Three artists -- Francis Caprani, Ron Kingswood, and Brian Saby -- produce large-scale paintings that are in turn exciting and mesmerizing, their rich content eliciting, demanding a viewer’s active engagement. Each artist seems completely absorbed in his own reality, drawing energetically in physical acts that effectively translate individual perceptions from remembered or interior experience, to painted visual abstractions. The results are wildly different styles that, in this exhibition, surprisingly speak across space, their contrasting visual vocabularies setting off conversations that surround and involve the viewer. There is a great variety of marks and gestures. Brian Saby is quite precise in his use of lines of colour, moving across the broad bands of colour that form the ground of his paintings—all in bright, highly saturated hues. Ron Kingswood works with more delicate atmospheres. At first his paintings seem all white and grey, and relatively empty. Then the layers are revealed – light touches of nervous, delicate grey lines activating different parts of the canvas, and areas of pale colour that seem to emerge from the light as blue, pink, yellow, green. Francis Caprani’s gestures can feel almost violent in their movement, with broad strokes that retain the painterly texture and are barely contained, emphasizing luscious colours, bright or dark.  Though their styles contrast, the artists have in common this reality: they challenge us to take time to look carefully, to let the paintings work to reveal meaningful truths about the human condition.

Read the entire essay by Madeline Lennon (in PDF format)

Images

Francis Caprani

Brian Saby

Ron Kingswood

The Bank Job Opening