“It’s not so
much what you depict but how you depict it.”
Paul Fenniak
Paul Fenniak
The Canadian artist Paul Fenniak takes the inspiration for his paintings from
movies, books and newspaper stories which he re-interprets as imagined narrative
portraits that explore overlapping realities.
As he explained in a Laguna
College of Art + Design lecture it is imperative “that you can keep a space
open for the intimate and personal in this mass media dominated world.”
In his dream like pictures,
Fenniak paints in a realistic style imbued with symbolic meaning.
As he has said “one needs to
balance realism’s wealth of experience and symbolism’s depth of feeling – you have
to look in two directions at once.”
With Bachelor of Fine Art from Queen’s
University in Kingston, Ontario and a Master’s from
Concordia University in
Montreal, Fenniak contends that “Art can make you feel less alone… Increasingly it struck me that painting of this kind had a
particular capacity for creating an intimate encounter of a kind that lent
itself to exploring the mystery of another person and thereby enhancing
empathy.”
As New York’s Forum Gallery
says about his work “Fenniak’s paintings have luminous surfaces and compelling
images that offer a combination of disquiet, uncertainty, urgency, calm, and
spirituality. His painting style contains a contrast of inner light with his
attention to detail, texture and atmosphere.”
In his complex narratives, Fenniak combines autobiography, dreams,
art historical references and the implications of contemporary life to explore
the hidden recesses of the human psyche.
And about which he freely admits
he is “Sacrificing the documentary realism of external fact to get to an
emotional truth.”
Fenniak’s current exhibition of New Paintings is on show at New York’s Forum
Gallery until the 19th of March.
No comments:
Post a Comment