A Mighty Gust

About

Green (Yong Woon Park) makes dynamic large scale paintings, working with unmixed oil paint on raw canvas. His work is vividly colourful, often humorous and marked by a powerful, affective gesture. For Green, the process of painting is one where emotion flows freely, it has directness to it that the every day life lacks. His subject matter weaves motifs from contemporary culture and politics, especially its guttural movements, with mythical elements and the natural world. Green is concerned with the moral failings of contemporary life.

Francis Payne makes works using laser cutters and 3D printers. Usually small in scale, the works are abundant in detail, texture and imagery. Payne uses plant based resin, pigment as well as industrial elements like spray paints or MDF. Concerned largely with historic painting of Renaissance, Baroque and Romanticism, he uses photographic images from his daily life collaged and laser engraved onto prepared surfaces. Those may be cast or full of hand gestures, brush strokes and fingerprints. For Payne painting is a journey towards sublime, and it is a fire hidden in a mundaine reality.

Romulo Gonçalves works primarily on paper and canvas using various media like ink, pigments, acrilics and pencil. Visually his work reconciles abstract expresionsm with an instinctive form of figuration; a figuration within a phenomena. Gonçalves works from memory and is specifically drawn to its elusive character. The proces of painting, that sometimes takes months, is a process of returning. It is also a form of carrying something from outside into within. Gonçalves’ work regards humanity and nature, his hope is for it to be a reminder of our connection with the Natural World

Green, Payne, and Gonçalves met at Bow Arts’ Lakeside Centre, where they worked in neighbouring studios. All being through and through painters they developped professional and personal friendships.

The theme of the exhibition, A Mighty Gust reflects on the energy, volatility and poetics, that in various ways mark the practices of all three artists. The movement in which painting is resolved can be swift, awe inspiering, beautiful and terrifying. Painting, like history, is a disaster. It is also a trumph that reaches for the highest peaks that visually minded people can achieve. As painters, Geeen, Payne, and Gonçalves navigate between those poles