To Ride with the Reins in the Right Hand Painting

"After completing an Art Foundation course at the West Surrey College of Art and Design, Paul Foster born 9.8.68, went on to Oxford University to read Philosophy and Psychology. Foster's paintings are stunning in scale and execution, typically six by four feet, they re-represent in classical oil, photographic images drawn from two non-art sources. First (and earlier to his work) the family album - biographical products of the Box Brownie and Instamatic and second (and more currently) scientific textbooks and instructional manuals from the biological and behavioural sciences - products for educational purpose. In both cases, he not only elevates their non-art status to the realm of the aesthetic, but he also creates a unique dialogue between painting and photography. Foster carefully selects his source photographs. All expose the heavy-handedness of photographic use and the optical limitations of the camera itself. Foster makes no effort to conceal the photograph's under/over exposure, movement blur, camera shake, flash white-out or red eye in his painting of them. Indeed, he delights in their technical shortcomings by magnifying them in oil onto his huge canvases. In doing so, he exposes the camera's fraudulent claims to objectivity and returns the photographs to the human realm, behind the camera, behind the eye. Foster is as fascinated by the historical evolution of photographic techniques, as he is about the use to which photography has been put over time. His subjects cover the informal snap-shot recording of family moments and the serial, didactic recording of developments within science. The source photographs are taken as complete entities, bound in time and frame, but Foster finds freedom as a painter in his rediscovery of them and celebrates their photo-temporal finitude by rendering them to the canvas in extravagant oils. Endemic to his work as a painter is his compassion for the contemporary viewer. His work attracts, rather than distracts, engages rather than alienates and inspires classical visual awe, without himself as painter, falling prey to the explosive artistic claims of originality or to the imploded non-claims of kitsch and postmodernism." Victoria Jaye