Modern Art Paintings For Sale

Dale Frank's latest exhibition Modern Art Paintings for Sale opening on Thursday May 27 at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, is a culmination of an experimental series of abstract images begun several years ago. In this dramatic aesthetic development, the essence of Frank's newest paintings is rooted in earlier work but with the artist's vision of the future of painting as a paramount art form.

These beautiful paintings, made from poured pools layered of coloured artificial varnish suspended in industrial medium, use seemingly random organic processes to harness the velocity of colour and light as a primary source of image. The new work marks a point in Dale Frank's twenty-five year artistic career spent questioning, redefining and ultimately transcending conventional perceptions of "beauty" in art, through his challenging work.

Frank's latest paintings propose a new concept of beauty through his purposeful introduction of scientific principles to colour selections. The artist no longer works from the laws of the Renaissance colour wheel, but with quantum physics, exploring the idea of "reaction" as opposed to graduating colours and the relationship of "time" to the processes involved in creating his work. Frank's colour techniques are a tool for the new language of painting and the manifestation of "image" as a forceful visual weapon. Luscious pinks, reds, purples, greens, blues and yellows are bled into the transparent varnishes he uses. This intuitively devised palette has a seductive velvety translucency activated by movements of colour created by gravity's forces.

In Modern Art Paintings For Sale, Frank has produced an exhibition of dynamic abstract paintings inviting a reflective experience of powerful relationships between his layered veils and pools of colour, capturing atmospheres redolent of vast open skies, brilliant sunlight and the experience of landscapes sensed rather than represented. The artist believes that "Modern man's emotionally detached connection with landscape is compressed in these paintings as an experience of the universal journey, the private unspoken regrets that define any passage of travel." Through his selection of colours, Frank aims to heighten and exaggerate the flashes and vortexes of travel to delineate these paradoxes. The artist's ideal of nature's perpetual motion is defined in this series as a grand artistic gesture. "It’s the universal crux of landscape and the evolution of all painting and art itself that makes up our viewing experience, the journey, regrets and the paradox are all brought into sharp focus", he says.

In Modern Art Paintings for Sale, Frank takes full advantage of paint's innate capacities of infinite plasticity, approaching landscape painting from a strong conceptual position. He instigates a mercilessly contemporary challenge with an emotionally resonant style aimed at defining new ground between minimalist, conceptual and expressionist conventions.

The exhibition's title, Modern Art Paintings For Sale, is typical of Dale Frank's approach to conceptualism in painting. It is a shrug of recognition towards the realities of the contemporary art market and of the potential for contemporary painting to engage in a range of innovative, challenging and intriguing dialogues with its audiences.