Frederic Tuten

Frederic Tuten is a celebrated essayist and novelist, who spends his life writing about art and beauty. In his 80s, the artist is wholeheartedly concentrating on his own oil paintings and drawings. Mimicking his effervescent and direct prose, the paintings are full of life. Normative perspective and scale are disregarded as Tuten crafts his otherworldly collages of beings and objects. Ginormous bananas, pears and lemons dwarf skyscrapers in his compositions and divergent planes intersect in the canvas. City streets are filled to the brim with animated figures, sharing the sidewalk with birds, teacups and vases. Delivered in highly pigmented, concrete color, these enrapturing scenes instantly spark the viewer’s imagination as they navigate through Tuten’s surreal blending of scale, color and composition. Tuten cites artists such as Morandi as having a pivotal influence upon his approach to painting, honouring Morandi’s assurance that everyday objects have their own charms and should thus be considered as 'serious' aesthetic subjects.