Scene XVI: Dean Fox, Keeping the Books on the Shelf

Matt Carey-Williams, Sandy Lane, Wiltshire, March 2026

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” (George Bernard Shaw)

Dean Fox’s latest body of work – Keeping the Books on the Shelf - sees the artist continue to make stunning glissades across the landscape of Post-Impressionism. Several paintings unveil the enduring inspiration of Degas and Vuillard for and on Fox’s practice, whilst several other works embrace new languages and structures, as provided by Bonnard and Matisse. As ever, the artist’s supple, plumose mark-making unlocks then re-animates the gestural, compositional code of early twentieth-century painting in France, but now with more emphasis not on congregation or collaboration but on dialogue and distinction between his source(s) and himself. Just as many of Fox’s new paintings still arouse with an embellished soaking of space (as tapestries of pattern, line and colour), now these his compositions begin to interrogate source and surface with a different agency; one less concerned, perhaps, with evincing the complex vibrancy of Vuillard’s salons or the iridescent fluidity of Degas’ theatres, but more so with unearthing the various binary opposites that propel yet problematize Fox’s creative enterprise.

These are contests that nurture the paradox – palindrome, even – of Fox’s art, humming in spaces between history and contemporaneity; discovery and invention; meditation and action; intent and intuition; figuration and abstraction. The art of his making, and the dynamic of our looking, by extension, now becomes processes that command a judicious disentanglement of time and space, the conscious and the automatic, but which inexorably lead to their haunting, hallucinatory synthesis. Where Fox’s work begins – as idea, craft and journey - so it ends, with these new works blurring any boundaries of known and unknown, subsequently (if not necessarily consequently) providing tesseracts of experience that transcend the limits of self and other as articulated mark and proposed meaning.

Fox’s archaeological dig of the bones of Signification of Post-Impressionism may continue his investigation into, and substantiation of that epoch (as design and device), but it is an excavation now underpinned by a more intense dialogue between the artist’s process and his subject-object. Fox uses the analogy of ‘keeping the books on the shelf’ to reflect the evolution and understanding of his own nature as both sentient and spiritual being. From a Zen perspective (an ideological strain of great interest to the artist), such an act orbits degrees of mindfulness and principles of non-attachment whilst also highlighting the virtues of simplicity and functionality. If the mind is a library, then books act as thoughts, shelved away in the architecture of the mind. When a book / thought falls from the ‘shelf’, we are ordinarily encouraged to put it back; a tidy ‘mind’ being considered a lucid, functioning one in this instance. However, such organisation and rigour (‘tidiness’ so to speak) is not always best for the creative mind. To fully embrace a state of phenomenological or ideological detachment, one could – should – let such books fall and leave them equally detached from their shelves. The alternative being to remove oneself altogether from the library of old thoughts and processes, thus eschewing the importance of such controlling thoughts and, by extension, elevate oneself to another dimension of (self)-understanding.

Dean Fox, Keeping the Books on the Shelf I, 2025, Oil on canvas, 200 x 170 cm (78 3/4 x 66 7/8 in)

Dean Fox, Keeping the Books on the Shelf II, 2025, Oil on canvas, 130 x 100 cm (51 1/8 x 39 3/8 in)

Dean Fox, Keeping the Books on the Shelf I, 2025, Oil on canvas, 200 x 170 cm (78 3/4 x 66 7/8 in)

Dean Fox, Keeping the Books on the Shelf II, 2025, Oil on canvas, 130 x 100 cm (51 1/8 x 39 3/8 in)

The two iterations of Keeping the Books on the Shelf (I and II), both painted in 2025, set up this interior (of space and mind) in varying degrees of registration. Version I is far more energetic and abstracted yet achieves its orchestration because of Fox’s desaturated palette and his commitment to let shadow and plane prevail over silhouette. This invests his painted surface with some of the mystery and antiquity of sepia-toned daguerreotypes; early photographic images that strove for the prose of image yet could not help but surrender to the poetry of surface. Here, the interior seems to whisper secrets of its past whilst simultaneously ushering in the dynamo of a contemporary chorus ringing in the novelty of pure abstraction. Whilst the chair, table, lamp and tulips all convey a certain ‘reality’, it is the discombobulation of the interior – as painted stage and inhabited salon – that dominates the composition, antagonised, in the main, by sweeping fragments of pure pattern that fly into the pictorial space from upper left. Clearly, the plan is not to put any fallen books back on their shelves here, but, rather, to employ such disturbance as a means of looking deeper into the composition; the painterly ingredients provided by Degas and Vuillard and better appreciate the mechanics of painting itself.

Keeping the Books on the Shelf II (2025) feels more arranged as a composition and, therefore, as a summary of painterly and philosophical propositions. A gentleman sits in his salon, comfortable in his treasured sofa, taking coffee. He is surrounded by the accoutrements of his bourgeois life: the panelled walls; the Limoges cups; the oversized lamp and the heirloom clock on his fireplace. Yet, again, the stability and ornamentation of the interior is addled by Fox’s loose treatment of the seated figure. His hands now a Futuristic blur; his head a jigsaw puzzle of simple pattern and his body forced to avalanche into the belly of his sofa as Fox conducts a delicious collision of two streams of lively abstraction. This second version feels more ‘readable’, and so it elicits a clearer sense of the artist’s engagement with his subject-object whilst also highlighting more profoundly his subtraction from it and – in many ways – from the arc of painting (if not the act) itself.

Dean Fox, The Dyadic Rule - Three's a Crowd, 2025, Oil on canvas, 254 x 181 cm (100 x 71 1/4 in)

The dialogue between subconscious interior and witting exterior – be they planes of thought, act and art – fuels these two paintings. It is a dialogue that is continued – indeed, made much more pronounced - in another monumental work, The Dyadic Rule – Three’s a Crowd (2025). Fox’s swirling turbulence of paint now more earnestly encourages form to evaporate into pure pattern, imbuing his surface with a brushy momentum but also a material fragility. Fox here makes specific reference to the ‘dyadic’ or ‘shared’ mind: a state that privileges resonance over learning but which can only be achieved as and in a mode of duality. Three is indeed a crowd because the Dyadic Rule only operates as a reciprocal act in a shared connection between two beings. So it is that foreground here contains two chairs, with the tremulous outline of a third dissolving into the painted ground. The energy of this shared dialogue then leaps into numerous spheres: the clash yet immersion of abstraction into figuration and back again; the palette that speaks in a dialect of contrasting hue and shade; the forms that feel so resolutely of the time they impersonate yet remain unquestionably fresh and of this moment in the manner of their establishment. This is a painting that weaves between these various pillars of debate yet empowers such assonance to release a complementary comfort across the painted surface.

Dean Fox, Sitting II, 2025, Oil on canvas, 200 x 160 cm (78 3/4 x 63 in)

The painterly freedom that such conscious disentanglement from language, form or even space engenders is realised by the artist’s design to privilege intuition over intent; to let his paintings flow more by giving himself up to the automatic act of it without always trying to intellectualize or control it. Fox has referred to this scope as not unlike watching ice melt, where style, substance, matter and meaning all shift gradually but decisively from one morphology or taxonomy to another. Sitting II (2025) speaks powerfully to this Zen relinquishment of self (as artist) to other (as process). The seated woman dominates almost all the picture plane, forming, deforming then reforming in arabesques of sapphire, sage and sandy tones. The figure is now also hardly decipherable with Fox, instead, offering a roadmap to follow – a tiny circuit that, in its repetition, begins to proffer a sense of the figure’s corporeal presence like writing words you are unsure of spelling correctly in the air with your fingers. No real effort is made to control or determine the shape of things but, rather, the surface dazzles in its unadulterated liberty as just a surface, serving to evoke and provoke in equal measure. Narrative is now replaced by nature; gesture prevails over definition; the painting drifting so beautifully and poetically in and out of intention and intuition, just like a daydream.

Dean Fox, Hidden form I, 2025, Oil on panel, 40.6 x 40.6 cm (16 x 16 in)

Dean Fox, Hidden form II, 2025, Oil on panel, 40.6 x 40.6 cm (16 x 16 in)

Dean Fox, Hidden form I, 2025, Oil on panel, 40.6 x 40.6 cm (16 x 16 in)

Dean Fox, Hidden form II, 2025, Oil on panel, 40.6 x 40.6 cm (16 x 16 in)

Automatism is thus the electricity that crackles across Fox’s new work. However, it does not serve Fox’s craft to think of this vibration in the same way one considers the Surrealist strategy of automatism. There is something far more candid, loose and painterly in the way Fox occasionally abandons construct and structure in favour of accident, fortune or chance. The two small Hidden Form paintings, (I and II, both 2025), duly declare a painterliness that does not wish to prescribe but rather intimate presence. The paintings are left to just ‘be’ as the artist attempts to focus on agency rather than authority. There is no necessary ‘plan of attack’ in this privileging of the texture or thrust of the subconscious, as opposed to the premeditation of artists like Masson or Dalí. The result is that the pulse of the known – broad, cemented, fleshy blocks – is perplexed by ribbons of the unknown, winding their way around these ‘forms’, issuing both certitude and doubt, delight and distrust in object and subject. Fox thus powerfully describes the wobble we all experience between conviction and fear; between what we see and believe; between what makes sense and what absolutely does not and all of which is played out on the same shared stage we call life.

Just as the books on the shelves symbolise both our need for discipline – that ‘tidy’ mind – and our desire to inveigh against such self-inculcation in an effort to embolden new ways of acting and seeing in a freer, more rewarding fashion, so can those books mark the pages of art history (fitting given that the mindscape in which this psychodrama takes place is a library). Fox makes no apology for his passion for, and manipulation of, the work of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and, lately, early Modernist masters. They provide the fertile soil in which Fox cultivates his compositions which, in turn, become manifest as a series of interventions by the artist’s own hand with the syntax, strategies and sensibility of the art-historical movements outlined above.

Dean Fox, Avoiding Mary, 2025, Oil on canvas, 200 x 170 cm (78 3/4 x 66 7/8 in)

Avoiding Mary (2025) speaks directly to the work of Pierre Bonnard, indicated in the luscious tapestry of colours, funnelled in shooting comet trails of gold, green and grey that zoom down a diagonal between upper left and lower right. The figure to the right – seen faceless in silenced silhouette – could be inspired by any number of Bonnard’s saturated figures yet, here, it embodies the artist himself. Pushed to the boundary of the pictorial space, ebbing towards a state of being and nothingness, this figure speaks to the occupation of self and how such self-indulgence stultifies the creative act. ‘Mary’ is not visible in the painting; rather than a specific person, ‘she’ is that stream of self-absorbing creative insulation that clips an artist’s progress. ‘She’ hums in the virulence of Fox’s heady abstraction here; the person who darts around the library putting the books back on the shelves without having read them in the first place.

Dean Fox, The Games Room, 2025, Oil on canvas, 196 x 260 cm (77 1/8 x 102 3/8 in)

The largest painting in the exhibition, The Games Room (2025) is inspired by Fox’s great love of Henri Matisse’s work. That passion rings out in the painting’s rosy, opalescent palette; in the ideogrammatic delineation of the figures that populate this dynamic interior; in the shared dialogue between presence and absence – as pattern and ground – and even in the unusual dimensionality of the composition where an exaggerated flatness is then punctured by volleys of shooting verticals and horizontals, engendering an ‘Interstellar’-like space that cross-hatches itself in and out of coherence. The result is a surface that offers the anxiety of a labyrinth with the cryptic curiosity of a chess game: one is never sure where one element is in the bigger scheme of things – are you lost or found? - and yet this maze – and its gravity - even as it lays out a deliberate and delectable puzzlement, sings as composition, with colour, line, plane, pattern, figure and ground all choreographed with extraordinary intricacy and elan.

This essay begins with a famous quotation attributed to the Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw. The words communication and illusion sit too close for comfort in the same sentence; a whiff of Irish irony that emphasises the importance of making sure that what is communicated is really absorbed and not just transmitted. It is in that crucible of understanding – an oasis of dyadic interaction – that Fox’s paintings really thrive. His is a practice that doesn’t simply purloin the designs of the past or even merely mimic the tenor and techniques of its greatest practitioners. This is an artist who seeks to understand himself and his own craft much more profoundly by, firstly, getting under the skin of Vuillard or Matisse. To feel their creative itch, the patina of their concepts, the dance of their line or the heady volume of their colours and, in so doing, arrive at a foil which the artist can then use to properly trial his own ideas. It is here – in that shared communication between dimensions of time, space and enterprise – that the Dyadic Effect takes place between Fox’s paintings and us, the viewer. We enter a feedback loop that sees inside and outside the physicality and psychology of the object; that illuminates the work of the contemporary artist not despite its grasp of the past, but because of it. The books are no longer on the shelves because the library door is open and the artist has long left the building in a blaze of creativity.

Matt Carey-Williams
Sandy Lane, Wiltshire
2-3 March, 2026