Philip Faulks: The Darkened Doorstep

2nd-23rd March 2019

The Darkened Doorstep refers to the colloquial phrase “never darken my doorstep again”, and engages with the concept that extreme ideologies, once banished to the margins are now returning to the centre to infuse both our internal and external worlds with the re-emergence of foreboding shadows we once believed had gone for good.

Philip Faulks’ recent works on paper meets these developments head on - utilising satire, pathos and bathos fused with caricature, the grotesque, the lewd, the sacred and profane, all colluding in a bawdy clamour to address topical tropes which include technology, psychological dissonance, managerialism, authoritarianism, ageing, climate change, self censorship, inner city development, avarice, fundamentalism and failure, amongst many others.

The antecedents of Bosch, Goya, Hogarth, Gillray, Rowlandson, illuminated medieval manuscripts, Chinese ink painting and Japanese Yokai-Ga drawing all inform the aura of Faulks’ brush and ink works; but none more so than his own fevered imagination, churning away belligerently to convert experience into the mulch which irrigates the striking images populating these unique and all too human pieces.