In his fifth one-man show Foulkes is still at work clarifying and modifying his statement, editing his material, and more certainly attaching his interests to the landscape tradition. Though much of the zealous compulsion has gone underground and refinement of a product become paramount, numerous features still merit attention. One hopes this focus and consolidation will not yield up atrophy, doubtless a premature concern, since his self-command remains intact.

The paintings are all double images within framed borders traceable certainly to Foulkes’ interest in stereoscope slides. They are self-contained with internal references, left and right in continuous comparisons. His printed or blotted graphic technique applied to the creating of pseudo-photographs has permitted him thus far two illusionary directions: a flattening of the immense space to the surface in a fracture of crystal freeze, or, with fuller value modeling across the textural fields, naturalistic or referential duplication. There are also two manners of compositional staging: mounds building to a summit, and “profiles” of sections facing left or right. All convey by traditional implication majesty and grandeur, but the false heroics of the mock epic and extra-terrestrial curiousness are also apparent. The lettering, scribbles, and dedications which formerly reinforced the two-dimensional souvenir post card or album aspect have become transformed to the depiction of vainglorious defacements of monuments by the inscription of names by the public. As before only the handmade marks give clues, however vague, to the sense of actual scale, the nature of the technique being nearly mechanical. The color, suggested by the source, is monochromatic; a fully saturated, tinted scrim of precious near-primaries: yellow, rose, lavender, or within the range of sap green to greyed blue green. It is used to aid in the depiction of aerial perspective but serves primarily to convey a mood, and intensities the images.

They are arbitrary, remote, complete, special, illusionary, and taut with lean and ambiguous energies.

—Fidel A. Danieli