‘John’s pictures are deft and prismic, welling up out of nowhere, a tiny tornado. They are like him.’ — Humphrey Ocean RA.
“I paint from left to right, as if I’m writing, but instead of words I use gestural marks to create a trail of spontaneously occurring ideograms. I make a number of journeys across the picture plane, always on the watch for splendid accidents.” — John Fitzmaurice. This ambitious solo exhibition charts the past two years of Fitzmaurice’s prolific output via a broad range of bold abstract pieces. As loose and exploratory investigations in colour and texture, these large-scale works offer a sense of playfulness in a time of polit-ical upheaval and flux. As Western governments attempt to introduce new borders, Fitzmaurice’s work transcends them with an international identity that defies easy labelling. Fitzmaurice’s father, an Irish immigrant, ran a coal-fired power plant on Staten Island, NYC. Fitzmaurice recalls accompanying his father to work and being dazzled by a ‘jungle of dancing steam pistons’ which may have influenced the iterative forms that permeate much of his work. Fitzmaurice has always been fascinated by the properties of transmitted light. The influence of his formative stained glass career can be seen in the basic structure of his paintings. Today he makes connections between the ghosts of representational objects and the ideas they might provoke. Using a wide variety of sources and improvised tools, he often paints with his face close to the canvas, examining the marks and scratches close up. The results are richly textured paintings, their colours shifting to the changing light. Accompanying the exhibition will be an exclusive, sustainably printed catalogue with a foreword by Humphrey Ocean.