Romeo and Juliet 8, 2015

Barnaby Furnas is known for scenes of graphic violence and emotional extremes, as in his bloody battle paintings of the Civil War and Iwo Jima that use energetic line and angular, staccato brushwork to collapse realistic detail into painterly abstraction. His wide-ranging sources include video games, comic books, pop culture, the history of painting, and the philosophy of perception. “One of the things I do well is let things be what they want to be,” Furnas once said. “You wait to see a face emerge, and then you help that face along.” His expressionistic canvases, bursting with saturated color, walk the line between figuration and abstraction, surface and space, narrative and formalism.