Sean Foley
Born 1969, South Bend, IN, lives and works in Portland, ME
Berserker, 2003, watercolor, gouache, ballpoint pen on paper, Museum Purchase, 2004.125
Chaos and comedy collide at incredible speeds in Sean Foley's work. Filtering familiar cartoon-like images through the swirls and drama of technicolored abstraction, Foley's paintings and drawings celebrate motion and the complexities of perception. Amidst the joyous colors and lines of Beserker, eyes and biomorphic images emerge. It is impossible to reconstruct whatever monster or animal lurks within the surface of this fantastical landscape filled with contradictions. A bright, sunny palette picks up the innocence of the cartoonish shapes, masking the underlying grotesqueness of the work. As viewers, we are left to go back and forth in Foley's elaborate world of line and color. This painting was purchased from The 2004 DeCordova Annual Exhibition.
