Robert Francian

"The universal need for art...is man's rational need to lift the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness as an object in which he recognizes again his own self" -Hegel




Leonardo wrote that a figure is worthy if it shows the passion of it's mind, and although he also said a woman should be painted with her knees pressed tightly together, the thought about passion is apt as far as my approach to figurative art is concerned‚ the thing about the knees very much less so. The paintings presented here are meant to speak of what it is to be human, images where we recognize again, our selves; an exploration of a journey of the psyche, and the interplay between persona and vulnerability. The series, inspired by a poem 'when you look at something you've lost, you see a part of yourself that has become permanent', is a document of my journey through the fragility and fragmentation of the psyche, love, loss, vulnerability, anguish, and the fleeting, subtle, and sometimes indistinguishable differences between all of these things.

These paintings are like poems themselves. Their essential character should not be expected to be easy or literal, but rather have elements of the fictive and ulterior, and perhaps become some...