Venus, Mars and a cloudy day on planet Earth

Bold, playful abstraction is Ōtautahi Christchurch-based artist Francis van Hout’s signature. Before reading this exhibition text the artist asks us to pause and encounter the paintings, take them in without preconception or influence.

These are the kind of paintings that reward your participation and interpretation. An abstraction where the artworks become alive with the viewer’s imaginative and sensory engagement. Akin to the paintings of abstract expressionists like Rothko, there is a feeling, a power, that is awakened through the interaction between painting and observer.

Using pigments made from earth sourced in the Port Hills, Francis van Hout fuses astrology, mythology and alchemy across three richly textured canvases. Each work is saturated with character, poised between meditative minimalism and a raw, primordial spontaneity.

Though rooted in the depiction of planets and atmospheres, the paintings are a nod to painting itself, in process, form and history. Painted framing devices, the visible traces of the artist’s hand and an attention to surface quality are constants across over a decade of the artist’s exhibitions at City Art Depot. This humanistic approach to geometric abstraction is distinctly characteristic of Francis van Hout.

Read more about this exhibition in our City Art Reader with Francis van Hout.