VOLTA8, Basel
11-16 June 2012
Vane presents Nick Fox at VOLTA8 art fair, Basel, Switzerland.
Ranging from drawing to painting, installation to intricate objets d’art, Fox’s work is informed by eclectic reference points, including neoclassical painting, Victorian visual culture, literature, craft, pornography and subcultural codes. He is partly inspired by floriography, a Victorian cultural phenomenon using flowers as tokens to communicate hidden or forbidden pleasures. He playfully exploits and reconfigures this fin de siècle language, to construct double meanings and unsustainable utopias. These tropes are the vehicle through which Fox finds contemporary currency, personal symbol and cultural meaning of longing, seduction, desire and romance.
Mirror-like panels and laboured drawings are built up through a lengthy layering of vaporous acrylic colour, sometimes over more than a year. This process results in dense tondos or intricate hand-cut objects that mimic the preciousness of lace, with doily-like forms folded, draped or presented in vitrines.
Fox transforms the found taboo image and context into one of intimacy and emotive experience. Languorous male figures emerge from his sensual, craquelure surfaces while overlaid botanical imagery fuses a symbolic role to his themes of desire, longing and loss. These tantalising idylls and elusive narratives are often rendered in dark or overripe colour that, along with his painting process, create a toxic fog, an Eden after the fall where innocence has been banished.
Dreispitzhalle
Helsinkistrasse 5
4142 Münchenstein/Basel
Switzerland
www.voltaartfairs.com/basel
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