ERIK FOSS, US

Picture This:

by camera, paintbrush or any mixed media manner available, Erik Foss likes to take pictures and make pictures. 

His abiding passion for the visual landscape, for everything that is pictorial and all the perversities and problems attendant to the act of looking, is the single enduring relationship for this highly social loner, a marriage based off constant infidelity for as soon as he has fallen in love with one body of work he wanders off into the temptation of new ideas. It's impossible to imagine how any one book could contain the scope of his peripatetic itinerancy. What he has seen. raw with a kind of emotional urgency yet stewed in a drunken wisdom, constantly expressed and roiled over by an imagination that will not sit still, is at once a near definitive portrait of a place and time and awash in fluidity, like the picture of a river that flows with such a fury that its constant change delimits its consistency.

His oeuvre as a whole is a group show, an evolution so constant and rapid that it comes to constitute an alternative mode of signature, one not based on the repetition of style or the redundancy of images but the accumulation of sensibilities. And the photographs, tethered to their times with a clarity of presence (oh, how so many of these beautiful souls are no longer with us) yet resistant to nostalgia, trace this journey as a meteoric arc of reckless spontaneity, an individuality based off the tenets of community that this artist holds so dearly he cherishes it among the many as the aesthetic topography of creativity itself. Sad songs, perhaps, sometimes painfully so, but sung with a scorching honesty and the truth of being there, raised in exultation and persistent hope, a solitary voice that sounds as a chorus.

Carlo McCormick in "If these were songs they would be sad songs" (2017)