Melbourne-based painter Josh Fartch is known for a contemporary approach to colour and light. He has exhibited in solo and group shows across Australia and the UK. He holds a Master of Fine Art (Research/Painting) from Monash University and works from his studio at River Studios in West Melbourne.
Artist Statement
Like life, painting has moments of creation and destruction. Somewhere in between these two states is my painting practice.
I work through a deliberate, rhythmic process of dragging, layering, obscuring, and revealing acrylic paint. Each mark is provisional — a forward stroke anticipates the next, while a backward drag reconstructs or partially erases what came before. The paintings exist in the tension between intention and accident, order and disruption. Exposed linen often remains visible, grounding the colour and offering a tactile pause amid the intensity. The result is a luminous, unstable surface that registers as much time as colour.
A major influence on this body of work is Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real (1996). In particular, Foster’s discussion of Freud’s concept of deferred action resonates deeply with my process. Just as past events are later reinterpreted and given new meaning, each layer on the canvas is subject to revision. The work becomes a temporal space where earlier decisions are continually reactivated, covered, or undone. In this way, I engage the legacies of gestural abstraction and colour-field painting not through quotation, but through the stubborn materiality of paint itself — through repetition, resistance, and revision.
This approach also draws from my time in Aix-en-Provence working on an exhibition marking 100 years since Cézanne’s death. His willingness to leave passages unresolved, to allow forms to hover between structure and dissolution, continues to inform my practice. I am drawn to that same openness: unfixed edges, exposed ground, and areas that resist closure. Once or twice each year I return to painting still lifes from life, using these sessions to slow down and study relationships of form, light, and colour. They sit alongside my abstract work as another way of exploring incompletion and quiet possibility.
In a culture saturated with fast, dematerialised images, I remain committed to painting’s physical weight and temporal density. These canvases insist on the drag of the brush, the residue of earlier states, and the way light transforms a surface from one moment to the next.