It is with great pleasure we're now ready to present a new solo show from renowned Ian Francis.

About the show the artist tells the following:

"I have been captivated by images for as long as I can remember. Over the past 25 years, for me the internet has shifted from an occasional research tool to an inescapable structure shaping the imagery that makes our society. It’s moved from the pornography and raw footage of disasters and war zones of the 2000s, to the obsession with self-presentation of social media, and now to an even stranger place increasingly dominated by AI-generated imagery that feels ever further from lived experience.

Painting is my way of trying to make sense of this flood of information. I am interested in the new visual landscape we’re creating, the way images recur, collide, and form meaning to me. I don’t want to dismiss AI outright; new technologies inevitably find thoughtful applications. But the most obvious uses attempt to shortcut effort, and for me the whole point of art is that the time it takes me to physically create something lets me think and focus on the ideas in a painting.

My work concentrates on the artificial realities of screens—film, television, games, and the internet—and the sense of their possible collapse. We still live in relative safety, but it feels ever more fragile and uncertain, as we’re constantly confronted with images of climate change, war, and catastrophe.

The colours in my paintings come from screens rather than the world outside. I paint images of people shaped by distortion, mediation, and selection, setting slow, detailed passages against looser marks that echo collapse, explosion, or digital interference. These competing painting languages create tension, the fragility of the detail always under threat of falling apart."