“Barnaby Furnas’s paintings rival the sensationalism of Hollywood special effects: forms explode with Technicolor glory, pyrotechnics and gore are reinvented with painterly splendor, 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 glamorization of war, corruption of faith and the legacy of false heroes.” – Patricia Ellis from www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk

Following the historical painterly tradition, Furnas mixes his own paint out of a combination of urethane and pigment. His style is marked by an unique application of paint, often using explosive splatters of red over a blue background and an unabashed mixture of abstraction and representation.

RXArt Party 2007 [ArtObserved]

External Links

http://www.mensvogue.com/arts/finearts/slideshows/2006/08/21/slideshow_furnas

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/barnaby_furnas.htm

Wikipedia Entry