Melbourne-based artist Juan Ford‘s recent painting series “Simple Intervention” depicts eucalyptus and gum tree branches as a visual response to the relationship of environment and society, in this case as uncomfortable and uncooperative. Australian flora and packaging tape, paint and misc. everyday discarded junk end up in a tangled mess in allowance for the viewer’s visceral response to the marriage of these oppositional materials which reside together in his canvases. Ford depicts indigenous Australian natural beauty “mucked up “with the mess of industrialization and “progress”.
Makes us wonder what we are achieving as a collective, and hopefully asking ourselves why we are distorting and destroying our environment at such lightning speed and whether or not we are doing enough to address this extremely important issue. I’ve written a lot of the responsibility of artists to expose the challenges we have put in our path; Ford absolutely lives up to this in these paintings, and he brings in a very important aspect, he brings in a much needed light at the end of the tunnel. A series of paintings dealing with a serious subject and beautifully conceived. Love is more powerful than hate, co-operation more powerful than competition and at the end of the day, when we wake up, nature in her incredibly intelligent way will prove more powerful than our destructive behavior.
Ford graduated from RMIT with a Master of Fine Arts in 2001. Since graduating, Ford has exhibited extensively throughout Australia in solo and group shows, winning a fair share of awards,in 2004 he won the Fletcher Jones Art Award, and the People’s Choice prizes in both the ABN Amro Emerging Artists Prize and the Salon des Refuses. He was also awarded an Australia Council studio residency in Rome that year and in 2006 Ford won the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, Campbelltown Regional Art Gallery. He was a finalist in the 2007 National Artists’ Self-Portrait Prize at the University of Queensland.
