Grey, Red (Getting Older)

Ōtautahi Christchurch-based painter Francis van Hout crafts geometric abstractions with adept sensibilities to paint materiality, colour and surface texture. These paintings are imbued with the characteristics that define van Hout’s practice – attention to tone, grain, quality of structural lines and indeed his signature wit.

Meticulously layered cloudy grey expanses in the works are weighted by potent borders. Co-existing and balancing, just as they do within the gallery in conversing diptychs. These works activate the space and the mind – painting being its own form of expression, distinct from language, that speaks through our senses and the environment it inhabits.

These are not paintings of something, but rather paintings that recall the gesture of the artist and the continuum of an art practice which has progressed to here. Van Hout builds upon the geometries of his compositional ‘slab’ works. Investigations into creating his own paint has led into mixing his own pigment using traditional materials of charcoal and sanguine. With an always active eye, van Hout is informed by an ongoing interest in the modern concrete cityscape, art history and the use of painted colour in the world around us. Things that we live with, that rattle through an artist to arrive to a finished work.

These paintings are absorptions. You have to go into them. You have to look close up to see the patterns and details.
– Francis van Hout 2026

Poking fun at the sore edges of life, van Hout has never shied away from black comedy. In this case getting older, wiser I might suggest. These paintings serve as evidence to that refining of practice that comes through time.

Read more about this body of work in our City Art Reader interview.