Plastic Skin, which will run from the 8th until the 31st October at Sarah Myerscough Fine Art, is an exhibition of the new work of RA graduate Anthony Francis. In his work we see the restrictive classifications of both existence and phenomenology toyed with and exploded in a tactile and colourful sensuousness. The rules of academic taxonomy are played with; nude and lubricious, the two-dimensionality of the canvas becomes a thin sculpture, a structured portal of metamorphosis in which the experience of the art work oscillates between those Kantian realms of exterior realism and interior idealism leaving us in a wonderful state where our perception of the world, of colour, is disorientated. We are made to think about how a colour feels, moves in white, and saturates; the closeness of yellow to white and blue to black, urged towards the desire to stroke ultramarine, soured by lemon yellow.
The majority of the work for the show was made through painting directly onto a tough flexible plastic sheet creating a large almost 'plastic skin'. When dry, areas would then be removed and repositioned, and then further layering would occur in an attempt to create a dynamism or inner movement within the paint, a rhythmic pulse beneath the surface. The painting would often morph into three-dimensions as if the surface was erupting or bubbling, this would often be made using silicone and paint. The plastic elements of the painting are heightened and the viewer is invited on a journey into the realm of the painting, one where they will move between the shapes, ride fresh tides of paint, and experience the tactility of colour and sensory perception.
Francis seems to be working from a point where he appreciates that not only does the painting create itself (being fully aware of the tradition of Action Painting in his application of paint at the preliminary stage in an almost gestural automatism) but also that the painting is confounded and infested with exterior force. This intervention is made manifest in his removing and repositioning of the dried paint and use of graffiti in Plastic Speech. Between his ideas of the plastic skin in art by introducing silicone into oil, of artifice upon artifice and the medical-cosmetic process of introducing silicone into the natural form with plastic surgery, the dichotomy between the realist form (the necessary being) which is not malleable and the idealist form (the free being) which is constructed by our moral-selves is dissolved. Ultimately, what we are confronted by in Francis' work is a vibrant, sensual and harmonious tactility.