Canadian artist Paul Fenniak paints with a careful eye on the natural appearances of things and through his process of painting, he arrives at a deeper expression of the human spirit. He has been considered “a master of the psychological realism” for his haunting portraits of people in random every day places like the beach boardwalk or on their lawn, often appearing detached or lost in their own inner world. And although his scenes offer us something familiar to grab onto as the viewer, ultimately, we can’t quite reach his subjects emotionally and are left to “invent”.
While Fenniak’s inspirations includes masters of expressionism and symbolist painting, he is coming from a place that is utterly contemporary. He has referred to examples of 19th century artists like James Ensor and Francisco Goya for their sense of realism and portrayals of intimate scenes, which leaves room for exploring another person. For his latest exhibition at Forum Gallery in New York, Fenniak continues to paint scenery where the intimate and personal are key points of each piece.
“Theme Park Patron”
One painting in the show “Theme Park Patron” for instance, portrays a girl caught up in an inflatable device on a carnival ride, set against a softly painted cityscape. The scene is fatally flawed because the girl can slip out of her device at any moment, but also finds a sense of longing in her face and transience in the quickness of the ride itself. Other works like “Unsettled Dust” see Fenniak experimenting with texture, reducing his use of detail and applying the paint more thickly.
“Unsettled Dust”
According to Fenniak, embodying the complexity of being human is something that in part comes with the experience of painting from life: “With enough manipulation, with light effects, things are not just a description of the outside world but they begin to symbolize something else- a subjective experience,” he says. “I’m not trying to create a psychological thesis about it, I’m just trying to get images that are true to those feelings, true to those experiences.”
Iranian painter Ali Esmaeillou reveals haunting parallel universes beneath the pleasant facades of everyday life. In each series of paintings, Esmaeillou explores the psyche of specific archetypes, such as warriors, or digs into the personalities of the characters that compose a particular story, like the great 10th century Persian epic, the Shahnameh.
England-born, Toronto-based painter 
Acrobatic bodies, dismembered heads and elongated limbs stack, twist, and slide among one another to create complex human compositions. The new paintings by 
For more than thirty years, Kerry James Marshall has been creating art to inspire important conversations about African American history and identity. His paintings follow the grand traditions of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, but with new narratives in which black people are the central figures. While Marshall initially began his career as an abstract artist, his dramatic shift to figurative painting occurred in the 1980s when he realized that African American artists and subjects were being excluded from major art museums and galleries. Marshall decided he would use the techniques of the Old Masters so revered in those institutions to create a new dialogue, in which black perspectives are given greater visibility within the art history canon.