Robert Fones

Contes en Trompe-l'oeil, Notes, Maxims

November 21, 2019 – December 21, 2019

Contes en Trompe-l’oeil

The first series of tromp-l’oeil paintings is based on my experiences in the Aveyron River valley in France. Each painting suggests a narrative that is geographical, anecdotal or fantastical. The source material is abstracted from its source so as to be hardly recognizable. The trompe-l’oeil evokes the dimensionality of illusionistic painted form rather than a realistic representation.

L’Enseigne de Gersaint Figures

The second series is based on a painting by Antoine Watteau, entitled L’Enseigne de Gersaint which originally hung in an arched space above the entrance to the gallery operated by his dealer, Edmé-François Gersaint on Pont Notre-Dame in Paris.

Watteau’s three-metre wide canvas shows an illusory space of the interior of Gersaint’s gallery that is calculated to optically and psychologically intrigue and entice the viewer. One of his figures is even depicted as stepping from the cobbled street into the space of the gallery. Her gaze is directed toward a painting that is about to be crated for delivery.

There are twelve figures in Watteau’s painting, some employees and some clients. I have sampled colours from dresses and jackets worn by six of the figures in the composition to create colours for my own series of illusory paintings. I selected portions of the folds in their clothing and configured these into the beveled surfaces of my paintings. Just as Watteau’s painting depicts an illusionistic space, my paintings similarly use trompe-l’oeil to captivate the viewer with my prismatic surfaces.

Cursive Works

Notes

Cursive is a style of penmanship in which characters are joined together in a flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing faster. It attempts to minimize pen lifts by creating a continuous flow of writing. While there are standard letter forms taught within cursive penmanship styles, cursive always reflects the personality and invention of individual users.

The cursive texts I used in the series, Notes, come from notes written by family members or friends that were given to me or found by me. I enlarged each note to make the unique style of each person’s handwriting more visible. Each note is meticulously reproduced at this much larger scale. The fluidity of cursive writing is subverted by my time-consuming and exacting process of building up an image through multiple coats of transparent watercolour.

The content of the notes is ordinary but their significance is their unique and individual interpretation of the cursive style. I knew all these individuals so the notes are meaningful to me because of this personal connection.

Maxims

To create these maxims I have used the Sutterlin cursive alphabet, an example of which I found in an archive in Berlin. Most of the texts are sayings or maxims that are mine. The texts can be translated as follows:

Mein herz ist / unter Verschluss
[My heart is / under lock and key]

Wir sind / nicht alleine / Wir sind / allein
[We are / not alone / We are / alone]

Verbindungen / mussen / flexible sein
[Connections / must / be flexible]

und hangt / sein goldnes / schild hinaud
[and hangs / his golden /sign outside]
From Nurnberger Lebkuchen, Elsbeth Fehlberg and Lotte Schobert, Verlag, 1941.

Ich sterbe / fur hitze / Wir sterben / fur kalte
[I die / for heat / We die / for cold] .
From British Library, Stowe MS 49, fol. 122r (c. 1300)