Jon Fox’s Haunting, Kinetic Oil Paintings

There’s a wild energy to Jon Fox’s work, present even when subjects stand still and stare at the viewer. With Fox’s oil paintings, specifically, the works burst and crack in defiance against the medium. And in each corner, a symphony of apparitions, with Japanese, geometric, and otherworldly influences, offers a new entry point. Fox was featured in Hi-Fructose Vol. 30, and most recently on the website here.

Works like “Heart of Gold” show Fox at his most intricate, in which a cohesive portrait emerges out of a cacophony. The artist, a U.K. native, offers some insight into his work through a 2015 artist statement for a show at White Walls Gallery in San Francisco. “Amid a wealth of swirling, coded imagery and layers of geometric forms, apparitions of characters emerge,” he says. “Embodiments, or manifestations of my own meditative thoughts and feelings. They often appear entangled within cyclical games and conflict, losing their way, or engulfed amidst the swirling clouds of a larger restless energy. Separately they highlight the multiplicity of a fragmented consciousness; altogether, they become essential pieces of a bigger story.”

This year, the artist’s work is featured in shows at Delimbo Artspace in Spain, Spoke Art in San Francisco, and Galerie Matthew Namour in Montreal, with a solo show that just ended at Galerie Celal in Paris. As seen below, when Fox works within the medium of drawing, harder-edged, yet similarly complex creations result.