Barnaby Furnas

Barnaby Furnas’s paintings are mock depictions of extreme violence. His beautifully rendered images swarm with bullets, which draw arcs of blood and explosions of painted viscera. Redemption through cruelty seems to be his unwavering subject. In fact, nearly every painting features people intertwined with an operatic and orgiastic display of death: Imagine the slow-motion gunplay of a John Woo film crossbred with the woodenness of an ’80s-era first-person-shooter video game. Atrocity is made playfully seductive. In his first solo show in a US museum, a mutilated depiction of someone’s back, as if lashed by a cat-o’-nine-tails, is on view near a painting of the famous abolitionist John Brown at the moment he was peppered with ammunition. Several canvases show a gaggle of Civil War foot soldiers in a bloody melee that seems to make martyrs of them all. Despite the overt gore, the rigidity of Furnas’s stick-figure protagonists deflates the violence. Portraying an emotionally and artificially detached world, Furnas consistently heightens the psychology of violence within the paintings to a kind of masturbatory ecstasy. Through skillful manipulation of form, one is enticed into a fantastic recognition of the works’ ridiculous ferocity. Interestingly, the turmoil of these earlier paintings is mitigated by the comparative formal restraint of the artist’s recent portraits. Made in the past two years, these images continue to display violence, but focus more on the outcome than on the offensive action. Significantly smaller in scale, these paintings contextualize the older work and let one see Furnas’s project as a form of moralistic hero worship, striving, however hopelessly, to enable a cathartic exorcism of aggressive human behavior.