Chasing Rainbows

Tobias Francis

Tobias Francis applies paint as if each new layer is a new scene, a new thought, a new perspective. The layers are never fully opaque, and allow for a building up of rich narrative and subsequent anticipation. More severe lines or separations in the composition, once combined with the overlapping of multiple perspectives, speak to the viewer’s own imagining of structure and the often impossibility of permanence. Landscapes, limbs and visuals of the stage combine to suggest but never explicitly give away figures and their contexts. Francis works from his own photographs and collages and his inspirations collide as strikingly as the scenes in his paintings – drawing influence from Bukowski to Gauguin, colour field paintings to Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.