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‘Half-light’ brings together a body of work created by Nick Fox over the last three years, including new paintings, sculptures and cyanotype prints. The works function as a mirror to the artist’s emotional life, charting Fox’s enduring motivations of longing, desire, seduction, love and loss.
His work is informed by an interest in folklore and myth and layered with literary references, in particular the writings of Oscar Wilde and French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, giving rise to a keen sense both of the pleasures and the limits of double meanings in the construction of codes.
Fox brings the series All of me - some of me (2014-16) together for the first time in an immersive site-responsive configuration. Consisting of 100 close-up images of the artist’s body in photographic cyanotype form, the series charts Fox’s personal journey of longing and romantic loss, including simultaneous life and death events: the birth of his second daughter, the end of his relationship. The delicate and sensual long-exposure blueprints capture and mediate a process of reflection and analysis to create an allegorical aide-memoire. Fox uses his own body as the subject to create a lexicon of personal and emotionally exposed snapshots that chart memory, experience, intimacy, pain and pleasure. When viewed together the individual images reveal an intimate and lyrical portrait reminding us that longing and loss can be a transformative and empowering tool to create fulfilment and joy.
In his series of small-scale paintings Fox revisits an enduring interest in floriography (or the language of flowers) and revelatory symbol. Twisted and contorted forms are concealed amongst an overabundance of imaginary botanical elements in desolate landscapes, introducing references to the garden, here presented as a nexus of the natural and of artifice, as a territory for contemplation, pleasure and magical revelation. Fox constructs visionary spaces informed by his archive of collected images and objects, that hold talismanic and alchemical meaning. Folds, loops and knots traditionally used as tokens of remembrance or devotion appear disquietingly out of place. In Tribute (2015) a glowing True Love’s Knot formed out of dead grass lies discarded in a dream-like underwater scene, while in Fools gold (2016) a twisted piece of lead lies desolate on a bejewelled bed of stones. In each work, Fox’s quietly reveals symbolic fragments of remembrance, wonder, hope, promise, love and lust.
Fox’s gilded sculptures extends the allegory; the emotional charge here becoming physical through symbolic transubstantiation of immaterial to material. From his earlier work in gold, which made use of gold dust gifted to Fox by his first lover, the meaning has now expanded from the sentimental to encompass gold’s alchemic and transformative qualities. Wonderland (2015), one of a grouping of endlessly looping golden Möbius strips, punctuates an otherwise flat topography, fusing a symbolic role to mythological journey and emotional transition. In Other conclusion (2016) a series of imagined love letters gilded in 24ct gold, stand in for the (now lost) four years’ worth of digital correspondence between Fox and his recent lover, charting their failed relationship. They provide a corporeal form to Fox’s ongoing interest in digital disconnect, transmutation of longing and the complex struggle to communicate across the emotional spectrum, ideas that resonate throughout the exhibition.
Nick Fox was born in Durban, South Africa in 1972 and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne and London. He attended John Moores University, Liverpool (1992-95) and Royal Academy Schools, London (1998-2001). Fox was a prize winner in the John Moores Painting Prize, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool in 2010. He was Artist in Residence at the National Glass Centre, Sunderland in 2009-10. ‘Half-light’ is his third solo exhibition for Vane following ‘Nightsong’ (2012) and Phantasieblume’ (2010). Recent solo exhibitions include ‘The Longing Disco’, The Photographers’ Gallery, London, ‘Bad Seed’ (with Sean Curran), Sutton House, London (2015), and ‘Phantasieblume Nåchtlied’, Ha gamle prestegard, Håvegen, Norway (2011). Recent group exhibitions include ‘Second Glances’, Michaela Helfrich Gallery, Berlin, ‘Nature Morte’, Konsthallen Bohuslän Museum, Uddevalla, Sweden (2016), ‘Ten’, Vane, Newcastle upon Tyne, ‘vacuum with a sparse cover of probability waves #1’, studio m_23, Berlin, ‘The Auction Of Desire’, Transition Gallery, London (2015), ‘A Union of Voices’, Horatio Junior, London, ‘Sex Shop’, Folkestone Fringe, Folkestone, touring to Transition Gallery, London (2014).
Vane was founded in 1997 in Newcastle upon Tyne in the North East of England. Vane opened a permanent gallery space in Newcastle city centre in 2005. In October 2011 Vane launched a brand new gallery space on the first floor of Commercial Union House, 39 Pilgrim Street in the centre of Newcastle. Vane represents the work of a number of artists, both from across the UK and internationally, as well as showing the work of invited artists in collaboration with other galleries. The gallery directors are Paul Stone and Christopher Yeats. Vane is supported by Arts Council England.
