Details:

This painting depicts a tennis player in action. The artist uses simple colors and lines of acrylic paint to masterfully portray a player about to serve the ball into play—exploring the tension in a single moment, a common subject for the artist.
Framed: 24.8 x 19.0 in.
Signed

① Artwork:

Rafffaaa

This painting depicts a tennis player in action. The artist uses simple colors and lines of acrylic paint to masterfully portray a player about to serve the ball into play—exploring the tension in a single moment, a common subject for the artist.

Using a combination of brushwork and airbrushing, Ford's work blends the languages of Spanish still life paintings, symbolism, cartoons and abstraction. The artist's compositions bring a sense of historic urgency to overlooked, everyday objects. Ford renders these comical and corporeal objects as barely there—inhabiting the space between a glance, observation and memory. In the artist's work, one object bleeds into another, mimicking the visual slippage of images. As part of his exploration of the act of looking, Ford's paintings have a soft focus that simultaneously alludes to the atmospheric sfumato of Renaissance pictorial spaces, the narrow depth of field of photographic images, and the pixelization of zoomed-in digital images.

Specs:

18 inches
24 inches
with frame
19 inches
24.75 inches

③ Artist:

Kevin Ford

Kevin Ford explores the act of looking in soft focus paintings that allude to the atmosphere of Renaissance pictorial spaces, the narrow depth of field of photographs and the pixelation of zoomed-in digital images. Using a combination of brushwork and airbrushing, the artist blends the languages of Spanish still lifes, symbolism, cartoons and abstraction to bring a sense of historic urgency to overlooked, everyday objects. Ford renders these corporeal and comical objects as barely existing as they bleed into one another, mimicking the visual slippage of images.

BIO:

Kevin Ford was born in Stamford, Connecticut in 1975. The artist received a BFA in Painting from Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale in New Haven, Connecticut. 

Solo exhibitions of Ford’s work have taken place at: 12.26 in Dallas, Texas; Semiose Galerie in Paris, France; Kate Werble Gallery in New York City; Essex Flowers in New York City; TOPS Gallery in Memphis, Tennessee; Lukacs Gallery in Fairfield, Connecticut; and MARCH Gallery in New York City.

Group exhibitions that have shown Ford’s work have taken place at: the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Maine; Inman Gallery in Houston, Texas; Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek, California; Silvermine Gallery in New Canaan, Connecticut; Reyes Finn in Detroit, Michigan; Casey Kaplan in New York City; The Islip Art Museums in Islip, New York; TOPS Gallery in Memphis, Tennessee; and Firehouse Gallery in Burlington, Vermont; among others.

Ford’s work has been featured in V Magazine and has been reviewed in The New York Times and Artforum, among other publications. The artist’s work was included in the book Artists II, published by Steidl.

Kevin Ford:
Rafffaaa, 2022
Acrylic on panel
24.0 × 18.0 inches /