Nick Fox

Nick Fox

Central to Nick Fox’s painting practice is his fascination with narratives of desire. Often subversive, and made in combination with objects, drawings and context specific installation, the work takes the form of drawing and painting, installation, and intricately laboured Objet d’art. Fox’s practice is informed by disparate and sometimes contradictory reference points and layers of meaning.

“Nick Fox’s paintings are compounded of difference - complex and disparate layers of imagery and meaning borrowed from high art, domestic decoration and subcultural symbology. Referencing Neoclassicism, Victorian visual culture and contemporary pornography, they are simultaneously clear and elusive. They engage with the matter of paint, are painterly in execution and yet their surfaces are as un-‘painty’ as it’s possible to be [...]This is part of the system of concealment and disclosure which Fox uses as both the form and content of his works, and, uniquely, their process of production. [...] Built up slowly from layers of acrylic paint laid over glass sheets, this replaces the usual rewards of visible development, with deferred gratification and Fox finally delivers [...] fusions of fine art and craft which turn his works into exotic hybrids.”

Stephanie Brown, The Tuberose, the Incubus and Endymion from Nick Fox: Phantasieblume, co-published by AEN and C4RD, 2010

Building on the delicate relationship between fine art and craft, his visual research explores representational and material orthodoxies in painting languages though two symbiotic strands: a physical exploration of the narrative potential of the paint material and the exploration of visual and symbolic codes of romantic desire and explicit eroticism, reflected in historical pictorial systems and personal codes of concealment.

His seductive drawings, mirrored paintings and craft objects reveal an intoxicating blend of graphic sexual imagery and Victorian floriography, creating elusive narratives and unsustainable utopias. Fox’s imaginary landscapes are seductive, luring the viewer ever deeper. Drawing on a vast bank of sources, Fox transforms the found taboo image and context (of photo-reproduction porn or fashion) into one of intimate and emotive experience. Languorous male figures emerge from his sensual and 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, one where innocence has been banished.

Nick Fox 1

'Nick Fox working in his studio (2012)' Image courtesy of Nick Fox