Juan Ford

Ford has shown extensively throughout Australia, as a regular participant in eminent group and survey exhibitions. His work appears in significant collections across the country. Ford has been the recipient of many prestigious awards and prizes including the 2006 Fisher's Ghost Art Award (acquisitive $25,000); the 2004 Fletcher Jones Art Prize ($25,000); the 2003 Conrad Jupiters Art prize; the 2004 Salon des Refuses; an Australia Council Studio Residency in Rome in 2006; an Australia Council New Work Grant in 2002; and the 2001 Whyalla Art Prize. Commissioned portraits include:; Professor Richard Larkins AO (Monash University Vice-Chancellor) 2007, Professor Ruth Dunkin (RMIT University, Melbourne, former Vice Chancellor), 2006 and Professor Fay Marles AM (University of Melbourne former Chancellor), 2005.

Exhibitions

Melbourne Art Fair: The Day The Machine Started - 2010

In this new body of work Juan Ford draws from botanical illustration and images from Australiana books from the 60's and 70's to create a new format of Australian landscape painting by utlising the portrait format. The outcome are aberrant gatherings of indigenous flora, like bouquets trussed by a supremely insensitive and perhaps blind florist. When placed amongst Natalie Ryan's Still born calves and Charles Robbs Tvek sculptures, Fords paintings become studies of the outside world, juxtaposed by a white and clinical environment. "Line honours go to the sharp display of Dianne Tanzer Gallery. Chilly paintings by Juan Ford, showingly prickly leafy perches bound with tape labelled "fragile", sit in a slick white cube, which contrasts with the rich Victorian building. Upon the shiny white floor, however, silicone herbivores by Natalie Ryan slump in meltdown, perhaps mortified by radiation or a sinister baboon lurking behind a rear partition. The whole installation is ingenious and unsettling." Robert Nelson, The Age, Upscale fair, scaled-down range, 6 August, 2010

24HRArt Northern Territory Centre for Contemporary Art - 2009

In A Phrenologist's Deception, Ford reveals an unsettling sensation in his high realism paintings. The concepts of contradiction and paradox are testified through the anamorphosis that Ford creates on canvas

Gravity - 2008

Wake in Fright Tread softly. Juan Ford's people are lost in troubled sleep. Shadows fall about their face and twitches of irritation pulsate the corners of their eyes. The leaves that form the shadows are eucalypt; unmistakable Australians whose tendril shapes immediately evoke their smell. And with it the feel of a hot, hot sun which burnishes the soul. Feeling hot, and getting hotter. Above, wheeling 'round the skies like a bleach-white mock of a crow, flies the skull in whose teeth these leaves are clenched. An ominous portent who casts them shadows, this Antipodean Grim Reaper in all its triumphant glory. Grinning skulls. Sharp white light. The mirage-like shade of a gum tree, which obscures but does not cool. An unnerving clarity of detail where none may really hide. These are motifs of great familiarity to Australians and our tales of early exploration are full of them. Particularly the symbols of death. Of fools who pitted themselves against the environment believing they could impose their will upon it. Who perished praising Empire. Who perished damning God. Who returned to gleaming bone amongst stray bits of leather, metal and camel. Who returned from whence they came. Dust to dust. And still the land lived on. Juan Ford's paintings are reminders, contemporary vanitas that implore: 'Wake up, ye troubled sleepers, for the shadows are already cast.' In the face of human rapacity, cupidity and stupidity, the environment is finally fighting back. The shadows we once cast upon the land are now cast upon us, like sardonic vegetal corpse paint, that make-up so beloved by Death Metal bands. With an artist's eye forensic and meticulous, Ford treads the tightrope between faithful reproduction and psychological tremor, referencing photography but moving beyond photo-realism. Every detail is in-focus, creating an unnatural (and unsettling) depth of field which both fascinates and jars. He deliberately aims for the seductive recognising that the longer one looks at a painting, the more the viewer becomes self-reflexive: "Sometimes this can be a twist of the knife or a tap on the shoulder, (a reminder that) we are mortal."1 Whilst this may appear a tad self-righteous, it's a theme which has been running through Ford's work for more than a decade. From the Romanticist suburban roof sunsets of the late 90s, through isolated souls projecting their (unfulfilled) desires in the early 2000s, to the awful splendour of atomic blasts or the reflection of a glass half-full, Ford has sought ways to portray the impulses that are important for him via an ever-evolving technique rooted firmly in the language of paint. Consider, for example, A Glitch in the System, where a dazzle of red pills scatter through the leaves. Pragmatically, it is a simple colour theory solution making the reds and greens vibrate optically, which simultaneously magnifies the "weird, unreal sensibility" whilst fragmenting the depth of field. At the same time, Ford remains firmly on message, conjuring "an absurd human solution to any problem. Throw a bunch of pills at a tree"¦ But that's kinda what we're doing with the environment." Complicit with this knowledge, Ford's people slumber on, lulled low by the noon-day sun. With eyes shadowed, closed or concealed, thoughts flicker 'cross their brows. Unnoticed, we engage in abject scrutiny. Of ourselves. Andrew Gaynor

Commissions - 2007

Juan Ford - Professor Professor Larkins AO 2007

Art Award City of Perth - 2007

Revelation - 2006

Passion is marked by a dark desire to inhabit and enclose the body of the other, but it is also the need to illuminate the self by a coupling with something that is implicitly bound to us. The other in this sense is a dense screen that suggests the sublime as a vast pleasure of unknowing, something powerful beyond our grasp. Juan Ford's paintings investigate the infinite space of the unknown as a place of spiritual unfolding, and force an evaluation between what is quantifiable and that which cannot be measured. The geometric motifs in earlier works surface again as an incongruity alongside human emotion. The bodies in the paintings contort in subtle ways to suggest that a tension exists between mental and physical states of being, and mirror the distortions of the anamorphic engravings. Referring to both the cinematic gaze and self-consciousness on the part of the subjects, Ford averts their eyes or presents them engaged with an authoritative other out of view. The dreamlike, architectural terrains proffer difference as an absence reflected in the subjects as a place of disappearance or forgetting. Each painting appears as a single frame in a vast unfolding of human drama. His paintings engage with the alliances that might be forged between divergent subject positions in a field of familiarity and strangeness. His depiction of the twin or clone draw us into historical readings of the grotesque, as that which is unnatural, abnormal and out of control; and current fears surrounding body replication through genetic engineering. Ford's interrogation of the loss of self-identity through a sinister double recalls Sigmund Freud's notion of das unheimliche - the uncanny, a fearful yet disturbing familiarity that surrounds things that we find strange. It is as though our first inexplicable experience was when we saw our self-reflection and the fear thereafter that someone might take our form. Ford challenges the uniqueness of the self by undermining its singularity and offers instead a sensory flow between bodies, producing a self no longer contained in one body and one location. A dark cloud hangs over these isolated individuals who no longer know who they are or where they stand in a technological culture, which homogenizes form His peaceful, yet disturbed subjects are invariably monstrous in their ability to evoke the uncanny divided self. Immense and incalculable, the simulacrum as unknown well of terror threatens to dissolve the self in an otherness that cannot be defined. His replicants and the obvious central divisions draw us into a duality. Yet the narratives suggest a mockery, offering instead an obfuscation of the borders and a narrowing of the great gulf between the original and the copy. The paintings exhibit a poeisis, bringing the unnamable forth through gesture and recognition. Hands are invariable the nexus between self and other, good and evil, idea and manifestation. But ultimately the narratives portray a concern with constructed others that continue to threaten autonomy in a biotechnological future.

Juan Ford - Elegy for Enlightenments Detritus

Solo - 2005

Fletcher Jones Contemporary Art Prize Winner - 2004

Salon des refuses 2004 Winner - 2004

The Golden Mile - 2004

Juan Ford's Golden Mile at dianne tanzer gallery is best described as his most technically prodigious and thematically ambitious work to date. The 4.5 metre painting draws from the aesthetics of industrial landscape, and contradictory painterly processes of evocation and cold examination. Suggested are themes of solitude, displacement, and an uncertain sense of place past, present and future. The work is presented in three panels. The following page shows a detail of the middle panel

Songs From The Penumbra - 2003

An exhibition of painted portraits of Australians singing, lit up starkly as if on stage, displayed together with large format paintings of the Australian urban landscape. The subjects appear to be in a state of rapture, bliss even, though upon closer inspection reveal slight anxiety. This anxiety reveals itself in subtle gestures, a lightly furrowed brow, or clenched fingers. The paintings are executed in oil on aluminium, and are engraved with complex patterning, revealing the aluminium substrate through the painted surface. Ford has used the metaphor of the swan song; the diva's final performance to represent an unease he detects and feels amongst Australians generally as we inched towards conflict, and potential redefining of the Australian character as seen from both within and abroad. The question is: Could our easy and fortunate existence here be under threat? These paintings do not only reflect an interpretation of the current political climate, but moreover are an attempt to represent the mire of fears and aspirations of the Australian people in these newly volatile times.

Juan Ford - Song for the Sleep of Reason Dark Brown

Juan Ford - Song for the Sleep of Reason Ultramarine Violet

Juan Ford - Song for the Sleep of Reason Orange

Night and Day - 2002

Clone - 2002

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