AUGUSTUS FRANCIS
Augustus Francis was born in 1986 in Los Angeles, California. The artist lives and works in an estate in Yorkshire in the United Kingdom. For Francis, the uniform treatment of the surface is the hallmark; the painting becomes an extension of the surface that can be seen beyond it. He is an abstract painter—color is at the heart of his work. He manipulates color understanding how each hue reacts to another to reach an impact in the senses. Action and rhythm also become a code, a language of compressed actions and movements on the canvas as we can see in his Autumno and Transparent Red series.
Augustus Francis is "a painter who finds no satisfaction in mere representation...[and] cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end." Francis naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art. Music is in many cases the inspiration that gives the rhythm to Francis’ gestures.
For Francis, movement is a way of controlling rhythm and in turn balance and force. Movement can be at the source of the paintings structure, before the process begins, or may take hold as the painting forms. Francis attempts to evoke the sensation of the sublime, “I paint what I cannot see, I paint speed, I paint Rhythm, I paint Time, I paint Gravity, I paint Movement, I paint the immaterial not the material."
Francis has exhibited his work internationally with the American Contemporary Art Gallery in Germany, at the Fernet Branca Museum (France), Bergamot Station Arts Centre (Santa Monica) and at Big Sight Exhibition Centre (Tokyo) and has his upcoming exhibition at Nymphenburg Palace in Munich.