Dean Fox’s paintings offer up a gloriously hallucinogenic exploration into not just the metric and matrix of Impressionism but, more importantly, the praxis and lexis of painting itself. Fox’s image first starts out as a digital collage, born from a tessellation of various works by artists such as Manet, Monet, Gauguin or Degas. Once he has digitally sewn together various vignettes from his chosen artist(s) source, he then transfers his montage onto his canvas in paint. This is when the chrysalis metamorphoses; the bug of historical reference – from Impressionism, Symbolism to Fauvism - now transformed into a butterfly of painterly possibility, boundary and contingency. Act as idea; license as veto. Often knocked back, his always curious yet cooperative palette glows with an eerily radioactive phosphorescence. Colour seems to flirt with both positivity and negativity like an X-Ray, with the dynamo between light and shadow pushing some figures up to the front of the picture plane and then flinging others far back into the ground, subsumed by scumbled arabesques of sensitive yet commanding brushwork. Dean’s protagonists turned ciphers sit so comfortably in this material flux – a beat of endlessly rephrased moments that morph in and out of figural capacity - but retain a fixity of meaning and poesy because of the elegance of his (and their) compositional determination.