About Barnaby Furnas and his art

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About Barnaby Furnas and his art

Text written by Patricia Ellis

Barnaby Furnas’s paintings rival the sensationalism of Hollywood special effects: forms explode with Technicolor glory, pyrotechnics and gore are reinvented with painterly splendour, and action-packed carnage is frozen in all-angle suspense. Drawing from the ultra-violence of big-screen cinema and illicit video games, Barnaby Furnas develops his own subversive cartoon world, populated by rock stars and Abe-Lincoln look-a-likes hell-bent on maniacal destruction. Barnaby Furnas uses his blood-and-guts subjects as a means to flirt with abstraction and design, entrenching his hyper-contemporary scenes in historical tradition. Creating a sophisticated visual tension, Barnaby Furnas’s work mirrors a current social anxiety, troubled by the glamorisation of war, corruption of faith and the legacy of false heroes.

Barnaby Furnas’s slap-stick scenes descend into a blitzkrieg of pictorial delight. Motion is implied with frenzied scratches so action can be captured in continuous instant replay: figures in stealthy pinstripe suits readily become Swiss cheese, punctured by flying gobs of red, blue and yellow. Bullets, perfectly rendered, and petrified mid-air, slice through his canvases in hails of white spray. Within the blood bath, Barnaby Furnas wields a commanding formalism: his painted fervour conducts real power and visual authority, demanding all-consuming attention and quasi-spiritual fixation.

Barnaby Furnas approaches painting with fundamentalist idealism. Making his own paint from pigment mixed with urethane, his canvases construct modern versions of grand historical themes: glorified battles and religious redemption are updated and laundered as media currency. Furnas slips effortlessly between representation and abstraction. Gushing blood, fiery explosions and clouds of smoke become complex embodiments of painterly gesture, drawing comparison to the poetic abstraction of Cy Twombly and Pollock’s expressive splatters. Combining this sublime beauty with depicted horror, Furnas alludes to a social obsession with self-indulgence and destruction.

BARNABY FURNAS

About Barnaby Furnas and his art