Scene VI: Dean Fox, Dreams of Pathways Home

Matt Carey-Williams, Sandy Lane, Wiltshire, September 2024

Dean Fox, Woman seated study I, 2024, Oil on canvas, Unframed: 26 x 30 cm (10 1/4 x 11 3/4 in)

CHAPTER I: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF SENSATION

Dean Fox begins his creative enterprise with a dig. A digital dig, surfing the internet for images of paintings by his chosen source then duly cutting, abbreviating, amplifying and pasting these vignettes together to issue a mélange of matter and moment; matrix and mechanics that – in one seemingly swift yet so consciously coordinated sweep – speaks so clearly to the spirit of the painter he both celebrates and interrogates.

Fox’s early works engaged with, and inveighed against, Baroque painting and, particularly, the work of Caravaggio. Fleeting, nebulous renditions of Caravaggio’s saints and sinners were fashioned like phantoms, oozing a dark mystery as their evanescence (as image and mark) was magnified yet problematized by passages of thick, bitumen-like impasto that would crawl up and into Fox’s chosen snippets like pending doom. The result was work that revelled in a combat of tenebrous binaries, between light and dark; texture and ground; image and gesture.

Of late – and after a brief sojourn away from painting - Fox’s digs have turned to different pastures and sensations: those provided by the much-loved and ever-fruitful gardens of Impressionism. Digital collages are now born from a tessellation of works by artists such as Manet, Monet, Degas and Gauguin and, in many cases, Fox will stitch together details from different artists’ work into one single canvas. A light flurry of sapped paint from Monet will drift into the heavier, more saturated ground of Degas only for the itchy, investigative line of Manet to pick up both painterly ground and pace and accelerate off into other arabesques of pattern and provenance. All of which is, of course, so carefully and cleverly orchestrated by Fox himself.

Once electronically sewn together, these various snippets engender the metamorphosis of Fox’s impression, so that the chrysalis of Paris and its smoky Salons of the 1860’s and 1870’s soon transforms into his own butterfly of painterly possibility, boundary and contingency. Act as idea; license now flourishing as veto. Often knocked back, Fox’s curious yet cooperative palette glows with an eerily radioactive phosphorescence in these first dances with Impressionism. Colour seems to flirt with both positivity and negativity like an X-Ray, with the dynamo between light and shadow, pushing some of his figures up to the front of his picture plane whilst flinging others far back into the ground, subsumed by his scumbled filigree of sensitive yet commanding brushwork. Fox’s protagonists turned ciphers sit so comfortably in this material flux - a beat of endlessly rephrased moments that morph in and out of figural capacity - but retain a fixity of meaning and poesy because of the elegance of his (and their) compositional determination.

Fox’s latest body of paintings now focuses on the work of the Post-Impressionist, Édouard Vuillard. Surface now throbs with more urgency, bathing in the saturation, ornamentation and pigmentation of Vuillard’s vibrancy. There is now more emphasis placed by Fox on the contests between flatness and modelling; plane and space; pattern and form. The artist’s own marks – his skirmishes and interventions with Vuillard’s alphabet of marks - thus feel juicier, more bounteous, simultaneously more decorative yet divisive as he cuts through Vuillard’s enterprise. This latest dig, then, continues the path Fox has already carved out in terms of his relationship with, and employment of, found imagery and techniques, but a further set of sensations – those orbiting outside the ‘what’, ‘who’ or ‘how’ of the sources he selects – now comes into play in a far more meaningful manner than before.

CHAPTER II: LIVING INSIDE ÉDOUARD'S HEAD

Fox’s choice of Vuillard as his latest source follows two tributaries: one technical, the other intellectual. Vuillard is hard to figure and configure. Form is prone to evaporating into luxurious showers of Danaëan gold much as shape or space is condensed to such an extent that colour seems to broil on Vuillard’s canvas. Figures both test and are tested by the power of pattern and embellishment, so that Vuillard’s visual language will, more than occasionally, drift into the enigma and ambiguity that only pure abstraction truly provides. His protagonists thus, likewise, oscillate between states both domestic and wondrous; banal and beautiful, and it is this ability of Vuillard’s images – and their garnish of index – to simultaneously assume such piety yet profanity that so intrigues Fox.

Dean Fox, Lucy’s shadows, 2024, Oil on canvas, 200 x 220 cm (78 3/4 x 86 5/8 in)

Lucy’s shadows (2024) is a large, meandering surface that evinces both the staccato of Fox’s digital archaeology yet retains the largo of ‘scape and mood together with the adagio of Vuillard’s execution. Boulders of pattern are here loaded on top of each other creating a geology of treacly, diagonal movement; a heaviness that, rather curiously, remains light given the artist’s zippy application. Emerging from this glacier of marks are quotations that function like just-remembered memories. A woman in a resplendent coat holds onto a vase; a partially visible painting of flowers is stacked at the back of a room. More frames morph into other equally magnificent fabrics which then, again, settle back into the slow accumulation of Fox’s ground. The scene is unveiled if not exactly unravelled. Questions remain even as illumination bounds towards the viewer with such vim.

Vuillard’s inspiration is perhaps most visible in a selection of works Fox has made of a woman seated in an interior. Vuillard made numerous such paintings, liking the distinction between opulence and ordinariness that such a domestic scene afforded him. Vuillard famously said that instead of painting portraits “… I paint people in their homes.” The distinction is important because it cements Vuillard’s passion to evince not just a sense of self or status but one of sensation. The figure, its environment, their connection, their detachment. These women are all anonymous yet we, as viewers, feel more closely allied to them as sitters because we recognise some of the somewhat generic interiors that comfort and propel them. Likewise, Vuillard’s ambition to transform melodies of the mundane into trumpets of a higher plane realises itself no more profoundly than in these quiet, domestic settings executed as if conjured from diamond dust.

Dean Fox, Woman seated, 2024, Oil on canvas, 150 x 110 cm (59 x 43 1/4 in)

The largest and most descriptive of Fox’s interpretations of Vuillard’s seated women is his gloriously sunny Woman seated (2024). Occupying a vigorous diagonal thrust whilst taking up almost all the pictorial space, Fox’s figure moves in and out of the ground that both suspends and supports it with sinewy turns of yellow, lavender, aubergine and sky-blue embellishments. Pattern begins to function like the painting’s DNA, with each flow of marks shooting on and through the surface as if guided by throbbing veins. Fox’s attention to formally retaining a fireplace, mirror and the woman’s hat, coat and dress allows the viewer to position themselves within the physical, painted space as well as the suggested room. Our entry to that room not hindered but rather driven by the flux of colour and pattern that occasionally pools into sensation rather than condensation. The feeling one might have were one to try and get inside the head of someone you think you know, but don’t.

If anything, Fox’s Woman seated, like his series of smaller paintings depicting women in interiors, neatly sums up Vuillard’s opinion that a successful composition was nothing more than a ‘series of harmonies’. An aureate, coppery burnish hums across the surfaces of Woman seated study IV (2024) and The Guest (2024) like a church varnish, serving to lend both paintings a rather hushed, mellifluous gravitas. That umbral, amber tone – as surface and mood – is then enlivened not just by Fox’s feathery touch, dragging form into passages of pure decoration, but by his occasional knocking back of his palette, serving chromatic surprises like visual hiccoughs across his surface which is then further cross-examined by a likewise variegation of media. Sections of Fox’s figural groups seem to swim together, unfettered by the need to describe, only to then see such progress halted by stubs of impasto, thickly interrupting the painted canvas and duly calling attention to both Vuillard’s and Fox’s surfaces and, by extension, the dynamo of their techniques and their sheer and shared passion for paint.

LEFT: Dean Fox, Woman seated study IV, 2024, Oil on canvas, Unframed: 41 x 30 cm (16 1/8 x 11 3/4 in)

RIGHT: Dean Fox, The Guest, 2024, Oil on canvas, Unframed: 30 x 26 cm (11 3/4 x 10 1/4 in)

LEFT: Dean Fox, Woman seated study IV, 2024, Oil on canvas, Unframed: 41 x 30 cm (16 1/8 x 11 3/4 in)

RIGHT: Dean Fox, The Guest, 2024, Oil on canvas, Unframed: 30 x 26 cm (11 3/4 x 10 1/4 in)

CHAPTER III: A HARMONY OF FANTASY AND REALITY

The dreamy domesticity that ebbs and flows across Vuillard’s images is the result of his desire (and design) to marry forces of reality and fantasy. Vuillard wanted to transform seated women into Madonnas. He wanted to ignite the bourgeois air of (his) predictable Parisian life with constellations of dazzling light, born of spectacle and speculation, that elevated the everyday into ancient clouds of myth and magic.

Fox takes Vuillard’s intent and then expounds upon it, pushing further the nexus between what we see and what we want to see so that the one essentially becomes the other. Landscape, figure, ground: all these demarcations slowly bleed into the language of abstraction so that Fox’s paintings begin to lose their hold on Vuillard’s vernacular and, slowly, begin to speak in their – Fox’s – own voice. Such is the case with the monumental Tea at Carla’s (2024). It’s a painting rooted in reality – the artist sharing a cup of tea with his sister, Carla – and yet it is, perhaps, Fox’s most elaborate, decadent composition that barely offers whiffs of Vuillard’s original sources yet still speaks so eloquently and forcefully to his dynamic.

Dean Fox, Tea at Carla’s, 2024, Oil on canvas, 254 x 200 cm (100 x 78 3/4 in)

Mountains of stony lavender tones cascade down Fox’s ten-foot-high canvas, spurred on by the fizzing pattern of marks enclosed within those giant blocks of paint. One can easily feel Vuillard’s celebrated dissolution of form and subject occur here: an evaporation that floats across Fox’s canvas like wedding fireworks in the dawning sky. Each lozenge of pattern, purloined and abbreviated from the original Vuillard painting, then becomes its own lightning rod for other lozenges tessellated up to and next to each other. The result is a surface that, again, reverberates with the sheer joy and abandon of orchestrated pattern yet remains underpinned by the reality of Vuillard’s stolen then lost form as well as the addition, now, of the artist’s own narrative and the memories they evoke.

Dean Fox, The picnic at midnight - a sin in the meadow, 2024, Oil on canvas, 50 x 120 cm (59 x 47 1/4 in)

IV: THE SPIRIT OF EXPERIENCE

On 6 September 1890, Vuillard wrote in his private journal “Nothing is important save the spiritual state that enables one to subjectify one's thoughts to a sensation and to think only of the sensation, all the while searching to express it.” Dean Fox’s artistic quest begins and ends with very same focus of which Vuillard writes: to unpick, demystify and then expound on the marks, gestures and compositional mosaic of a much-loved art movement in the hopes he can find another light – perhaps that of himself – in the cracks of that mosaic. That light, for Fox, is the sensation that Vuillard is so keen to effectuate: a vibration now become Fox’s authorisation to connect the experiential with the spiritual; the known with the unknown, and to source and savour the one in the other.

We find such synergy between poles of being and becoming so clearly in the lavish emerald and jade landscape of Fox’s The picnic at midnight – a sin in the meadow (2024). Paint tracks the outline strangely familiar mountains, a lake and some tree-lined hills yet also evokes the wispy delineation of figures that seem to pass dimensionally before our very eyes. Nothing is fixed, everything moves both in connection and contradistinction, lending the surface a pulse and pang that is at once both achingly beautiful and yet pregnant with such possibility.

Dean Fox, The Narrator, 2024, Oil on canvas, 150 x 130 cm (59 x 51 1/8 in)

Such unadulterated beauty is, for Fox, the elevation of forms that attempt to embrace the ‘here’ and ‘after’, much in the same way that Vuillard let colour, brushwork, density and saturation eclipse any necessity or urge for form or structure. The Narrator (2024) neatly encapsulates that. At the vanishing point of the composition is the head of a standing woman. She is accompanied by another, seated woman. Both wear grey, funereal garb and, indeed there is a wraith-like quality to the seated figure, so that these two protagonists could seemingly occupy the gateway from experience to spirit. Large booms of harvest yellows and sunny-soaked blues then effloresce out from the standing woman, offering a brilliant contrast to her dour tonality. Ribbons and rhythms of colour dance across Fox’s canvas, all contained and controlled by his pulsation of marks.

Fox thus provides both the ointment and its fly when exploring the work of Vuillard. Landscapes of sheer joy that are sometimes peppered with flecks of sadness. Light is bruised by shadow. The dream is broken by reality. These new paintings are an absolute joy to behold not just because they whisper some of Vuillard’s secrets; not just because they are objectively and unarguably delectable objects, but because they offer a little slice of hope and refuge in a world persistently stunned and dunned by egregious narratives and narrators – be they politicians and the mindless systems of hate and violence many propagate and refuse to dismantle. Great art can emerge from great pain. It can - and must - also spring forth from wish, wonder and enchantment. Fox’s work begins and flourishes in that spring of promise and optimism, of colour and furbelow, and that, for many, is all those times belonging to Vuillard wanted. It’s all these times belonging to Fox needs.

Matt Carey-Williams
Sandy Lane, Wiltshire
13-16 September, 2024