Robert Fones
Six-Grid Paintings
November 25, 2023 – January 6, 2024
In Six-Grid Paintings, Robert Fones returns to the trompe-l’oeil bevelled shapes he has explored throughout his practice but with several significant innovations. Fones has selected five wordmarks—four company names and one place name—to explore the way letterforms are broken up and constrained by the six-by-six grid foundation of this new painting series. He spreads the letters across four, six or seven canvases, creating abstract-looking compositions that challenge the recognisable nature of brand identity.
The extended strokes of some letters within each brand name are a typographic device originally intended to give each wordmark its own unique graphic identity. However, Fones uses these extensions to create a continuum across all the panels of a single work and to arbitrarily cut off parts of some letters making the brand name less recognizable and placing emphasis on the abstract appearance of each canvas.
The brand names have particular personal associations for Fones connecting to events in his recent past and historical associations with his life in London, Ontario where he was born. He ponders how historical moments, captured photographically, existed outside his own time and yet resonate within his experience of places frequented by his father and himself, forty years apart. On another level, the letterforms have also migrated through time, evolving gradually and have clustered together to spell out these brand names, each with its own history, meaning and mythology.
Read the full exhibition text here : Robert Fones Six-Grid Paintings PDF
Opening Reception
November 25, 2023 2:00 pm – 5:00 pmArtist Links
Included Artworks
artwork detail
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