In Simon Casson’s paintings we are presented with the Western tradition of figure painting reinterpreted for a contemporary audience. The distinctive layering of the paint application is also a layering of attitudes. Painstaking and flawless quotations of high renaissance and baroque paintings are threatened with obliteration by recklessly exhibitionist mark-making. There is a stirring mixture of formality and the casual: the exactitude with which he draws his figures, or paints a fruit, is balanced by the informal gesture of dragging his fingers though the paint to interfere (or literally break up) the surface.
Casson’s paintings have been rapturously received: he has gone on to exhibit with great success across North America and Europe. Last year he had solo exhibitions in the USA and at the largest contemporary art space in Canada.
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