43 Inverness Street is pleased to announce Anthony Faroux’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.

Faroux is presenting new paintings which can be perceived as a time for careful reflection. In them, shapes refer beyond their formal qualities and appear as objects; they could be tools, guns, buildings or other architectural features. They have a function and are stripped down to the essence of themselves using basic, obvious, frontal views. Laid out on the canvas as if they were in an ethnographic study or as a plate in an encyclopedia, they are void of obvious context.

By subtly implying stony depictions, as possible in still lifes and landscapes, his paintings lightly play around genres. As much as these objects have a apparent calm to them, they are also active, interacting with one another, coming in and out of the frame in elusive movements suggesting cinema or comic books, a telling of a story.

If a painting can create a context for thought, is it about calm deliberation? These references in these paintings are not specific enough to draw one's attention outside of the room in which one views them. The tones and hues of the grey of the paint is an abstracting element, and does not refer to things or objects outside of the painted works themselves. In this way, one's attention is constantly re-directed inward toward the material of the work. Though it is risky to lack any specific exterior references for viewers to grasp onto, the aesthetics of the paintings are wagered against this risk and win out because they look so good.

Anthony Faroux’s ground is a standard canvas. Brushed on to the surface of this ground are areas broken and fit together and are recognisable as such in the most specifically generic manner. Because of this, they reward with the possibilities of dissolution made solid.

Anthony Faroux works and lives in London. He graduated in 2007 from the Royal Academy Schools in London and most recently exhibited in the Jerwood Painting Fellowship touring show (2013-14); Jerwood Visual Arts, London, BayArt Cardiff, Aberystwyth Arts Centre, The Gallery at NUCA Norwich. Other exhibitions include “Enjoy the Squares&Triangles you know. Discover the Squares&Triangles you don’t Know”, Arcade, London (2013), “I like what you do”, 43 Inverness Street, London (2013), “Artist in Residence”, DLI Gallery Durham (2011), and “Bakkar Island” at Five Years Gallery in London (2010).