Artist
John Finneran *1979

About the work
Here, Finneran playfully illustrates the expressive force of the eye. Yet the artist does not keep to any arrangement of eyes and eyebrows in pairs. Instead they are inverted or exchanged; even a seventh eye looks in from the right of the painting. Three eyes in particular capture our attention because of their yellowish-green shade. In a comic-like way the Manhattan-born artist shifts the game of seeing and being seen into focus. At the same time, the painting invites us to study the details of the depiction more carefully: thus some eyes have been glazed, whereas for others the artist has factored the visibility of the material. This brings Frank Stella’s famous statement to mind: You see what you see, namely paint on a carrier. With a humorous levity, working with serial arrangements and combining forms are linked here to traditions of Pop and Minimal Art.