Tobias Francis

About

Tobias Francis (b.1998) reconciles both his trickster and straight shooting ways through painting.

Francis is drawn to the slipperiness of paint (like language) to elucidate and veil; to interrogate the artist’s own generosity, and question how withholding information can inform more, not less. Kinship then is felt with OuLiPo writers such as Raymond Queneau and artists Forrest Bess and Giorgio Morandi. Their uses of limitation engender greater seriality and repetition in his recent paintings, often small-scale and uniform in size.

Francis plays with compositional trickery and visual artifice. Wordplay and paint are lyrically employed. Illuminated manuscripts inform sequenced or mirrored forms. Linework weaves, space distorts, layers of glazed oil paint fluctuate in close tonalities. No hierarchy of object or action — from a hammer to a slithering snake — holds precedence for use.

Collaged reference material uses drawings, digital ephemera and 1800s wood engravings; it is met with a transcribing left eye and translating right eye throughout the painting process. This interpretation of material allows for multiple pictorial interests of Tobias’ — from materiality, notation, appropriation, flatness, and edge — to percolate into each finished painting.

Painting is a joy; may trickster Tobias live long.