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Nick Fox

Date of birth 24.Apr.72
Place of birth durban
Country of residence United Kingdom
Contact nick@foxart.org.uk

Building on the delicate relationship between fine art and craft, Nick Fox’s work questions the orthodoxies inherited in the historical traditions of painting. Fox uses paint as a tool for visual experimentation and speculation with regards to representations of narrative, objecthood and the territories of painting by examining how paint as a material can act as a metaphor of narrative content.

Principally investigating compound values of desire, Fox’s paintings imply a complex and personal set of figurative and decorative symbols, signs and codes of desire, articulated through explorations of content, material (paint) and context. Fox is interested in establishing and articulating a language of desire through editing , reconfiguring and recontextualising; found erotic material, decorative Victorian wallpaper patterns, lost lace making crafts and the patina of old photographs, represented through the facade of a romantic painting tradition which attempts to analyse the objet petit a, the unattainable object of desire. This enquiry is further elaborated through a visual investigation into historical decorative and floral codes of desire, signs and symbols, appropriated from historical sources as well as historical artifacts. The Historical context of this research is triggered by Victorian Florography; the complex codes employed by lovers in giving and receiving flowers to navigate around unacceptable public proclamations of desires, and by the ability of Vanitas painting to covey complex moral messages through the presentation of elaborate still life painting. Victorian Lovers would use this language to circumvent austere Victorian moral codes through complex systems of disguise. In other work, unfolding narratives of fantasy are suggested by his use of delicate drawings interwoven and embellished with layers of corrupted decoration. Figures are veiled, secreted and often isolated. Closer examination of the seductive surface unveils a concealed narrative.

Fox actively plays with this representation, oscillating between longing and disappointment, beauty and corruption, the real and the speculative.

In Fox’s work, layers of drawing and paint are painstakingly built up over a long period on sheets of glass. The piece is then inverted and the glass removed to reveal a work that consists of only paint with no supporting substrate. This skin is left in this flexible state, the edges delicately filigreed, inlaid, cut away, embellished and placed on various rods, period tables or in wall based paintings, attached to panels. In other Three dimensional works, such as embedded 2007, Fox cuts his carefully crafted skins of paint to simulate a domestic doily, simultaneously a low-art domestic indicator and an historical artefact. This association is a fundamental component in reading the work, situating the painting within the arena of assumed values of concealment and secrets.

Exhibitions '00 Nature Part 1, 10.Apr - 15.May.08, Contemporary Art Projects, Jerwood Contemporary Painters, 15.Feb - 31.Mar.07, Jerwood Space, Winter Exhibition, 18.Jan - 18.Feb.07, Contemporary Art Projects, Salon Connexions, 06.Dec - 22.Dec.06, Contemporary Art Projects

Publications Nick Fox - New Paintings / Unveiled, 2006

 

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