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Lot Essay
Barnaby Furnas' Suicide #7 is an epic spectacle of light, line and colour which marks a triumphal return to the tradition of history painting but updated for the digital age. The artist's vivid bursts of colour, thin aqueous marbled areas of paint and ingenious techniques of applying paint to canvas all demonstrate his strong interest in the rich possibilities of the physical process of applying pigment to a surface. This large scale, action-packed canvas dates from the time of his first solo exhibition at New York's Marianne Boesky Gallery which marked him out as one of the most innovative and visually arresting artists of his generation.
This highly animated image features the figures of three suited men standing on a beach, their bodies disintegrating as they are consumed by a shower of bullets. In Furnas' characteristically chaotic style every part of the action is depicted in infinite detail, from the slipstream of the bullet as it shots out of the gun barrel to remains of the body as it crumbles from existence. This revelation in the iconography of our modern visual language continues by placing this apocalyptic scene on a beach - the golden sand, crashing waves and sprays of salty foam reprising their traditional role as a metaphor for the land between the known and the unknown worlds.
Born in Philadelphia in 1974, Furnas is a true child of the video-game generation. In Suicide #7, the rudimentary figures of the early generation of 'shoot-em up' games have been combined with the hyper-reality violence of their modern day counterparts to produce a new artistic vision of the traditional battlefield scenes that adorn the walls of grand palaces throughout Europe. In Furnas' version the need to accurately depict historical events has been abandoned, instead concentrating on the ferocity of the violence and the total annihilation that result from it.
"In graduate school I was splitting my time between studying French Romantic painting and going to action movies like Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, so I decided to combine the two, taking what I loved about action movies, which is all the shit flying around, and subjecting it to what I love about painting, which is the stillness and silence. The idea was to make a blockbuster painting" (Furnas, quoted by C. Dunham, 'Interview with Barnaby Furnas, Barnaby Furnas, New York 2009, p. 146).
But just as his depiction of violence seems to explode off the surface of the canvas, the technical means by which he depicts these bursts of aggression is perfectly executed with an extraordinary amount of control. Previously used to working on a much more intimate scale, with his Suicide paintings he discovered how he could get urethane-based paint to behave like watercolour on a larger scale, at the same time maintaining its transparent fluidity and dry appearance. In addition to his judicious use of paint, the manner of its application is also as equally important. For example, Furnas often uses hypodermic needles to apply the red paint which signifies the spurting blood, as he feels it more accurately gives him the aesthetic effect he is trying achieve, rather than using a traditional paintbrush.
The inspiration for the distinct visual style that distinguishes much of Furnas' best work can be found in several sources. Furnas has himself admitted that during his experiments with LSD in his youth he first noticed the trails in the air when people waved their hands around, "There's something about what drugs do to time I think is really interesting. And it was something I wanted to include in the paintings. There was an idea that painting could just be this single moment, but why, when it could also be twenty seconds of movement, where everything in that twenty seconds could be there" (Furnas, quoted by S. Momin in 'A New Apocalypse, In Vain', Barnaby Furnas, New York 2009, p. 10). In his battle scenes, Furnas also ultilises what he has called "video game time", a device in which a speeding bullet leaves one side of the canvas while entering simultaneously on the other side. By evoking the off-canvas space as well as the movement of time, Furnas recalls the work of the Cubists and the Futurists with their depiction of fractured form and movement.
With its distinctive graphic style and meticulous execution Suicide #7 is an important example of work from one of Furnas' early series. His 2002 show at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York launched his career to a wider public as an artist with 'a flair for spotting art-historical styles that contest smartly with more contemporary visual culture' (P. Eleey, 'Barnaby Furnas', Frieze, London 2002, accessed via http:/www.infrieze.com/issue/print_back/barnaby_furnas/). By skilfully re-interpreting the grand art historical traditions of the past with ultra contemporary references, Suicide #7 successfully combine a red-hot subject matter with masterful execution.
This highly animated image features the figures of three suited men standing on a beach, their bodies disintegrating as they are consumed by a shower of bullets. In Furnas' characteristically chaotic style every part of the action is depicted in infinite detail, from the slipstream of the bullet as it shots out of the gun barrel to remains of the body as it crumbles from existence. This revelation in the iconography of our modern visual language continues by placing this apocalyptic scene on a beach - the golden sand, crashing waves and sprays of salty foam reprising their traditional role as a metaphor for the land between the known and the unknown worlds.
Born in Philadelphia in 1974, Furnas is a true child of the video-game generation. In Suicide #7, the rudimentary figures of the early generation of 'shoot-em up' games have been combined with the hyper-reality violence of their modern day counterparts to produce a new artistic vision of the traditional battlefield scenes that adorn the walls of grand palaces throughout Europe. In Furnas' version the need to accurately depict historical events has been abandoned, instead concentrating on the ferocity of the violence and the total annihilation that result from it.
"In graduate school I was splitting my time between studying French Romantic painting and going to action movies like Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, so I decided to combine the two, taking what I loved about action movies, which is all the shit flying around, and subjecting it to what I love about painting, which is the stillness and silence. The idea was to make a blockbuster painting" (Furnas, quoted by C. Dunham, 'Interview with Barnaby Furnas, Barnaby Furnas, New York 2009, p. 146).
But just as his depiction of violence seems to explode off the surface of the canvas, the technical means by which he depicts these bursts of aggression is perfectly executed with an extraordinary amount of control. Previously used to working on a much more intimate scale, with his Suicide paintings he discovered how he could get urethane-based paint to behave like watercolour on a larger scale, at the same time maintaining its transparent fluidity and dry appearance. In addition to his judicious use of paint, the manner of its application is also as equally important. For example, Furnas often uses hypodermic needles to apply the red paint which signifies the spurting blood, as he feels it more accurately gives him the aesthetic effect he is trying achieve, rather than using a traditional paintbrush.
The inspiration for the distinct visual style that distinguishes much of Furnas' best work can be found in several sources. Furnas has himself admitted that during his experiments with LSD in his youth he first noticed the trails in the air when people waved their hands around, "There's something about what drugs do to time I think is really interesting. And it was something I wanted to include in the paintings. There was an idea that painting could just be this single moment, but why, when it could also be twenty seconds of movement, where everything in that twenty seconds could be there" (Furnas, quoted by S. Momin in 'A New Apocalypse, In Vain', Barnaby Furnas, New York 2009, p. 10). In his battle scenes, Furnas also ultilises what he has called "video game time", a device in which a speeding bullet leaves one side of the canvas while entering simultaneously on the other side. By evoking the off-canvas space as well as the movement of time, Furnas recalls the work of the Cubists and the Futurists with their depiction of fractured form and movement.
With its distinctive graphic style and meticulous execution Suicide #7 is an important example of work from one of Furnas' early series. His 2002 show at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York launched his career to a wider public as an artist with 'a flair for spotting art-historical styles that contest smartly with more contemporary visual culture' (P. Eleey, 'Barnaby Furnas', Frieze, London 2002, accessed via http:/www.infrieze.com/issue/print_back/barnaby_furnas/). By skilfully re-interpreting the grand art historical traditions of the past with ultra contemporary references, Suicide #7 successfully combine a red-hot subject matter with masterful execution.