About the Work
One of Barnaby Furnas’s first experiments with printmaking, the Boogie Man etching uses the vibrant fluidity characteristic of his oil and watercolor paintings. Sketched-out in broad strokes, the form of a presumed bogeyman explodes in firework-like eruptions of fantastic and gory colors, playing out a child’s cathartic revenge fantasy on the monstrous, terrorizing figure. By combining the strategies of cartooning with the decadence of high art, Furnas flirts with abstraction and design, entrenching his hyper-contemporary scenes in historical tradition.
About the Artist
Barnaby Furnas grew up a teenage graffiti artist at a Quaker-based commune in Philadelphia. After graduate school, he burst onto the art scene with paintings depicting American Civil War battles infused with a cartoon sensibility: riots of motion and pigment evoke violent blood splatters, dismemberments, and attention-grabbing "retinal sizzle." Furnas deftly merges his conflation of fantasy and history with his formalist concerns of material realism and a guerilla misuse of watercolor. From portraits of well-to-do nicotine addicts to epic-sized landscapes of floods of blood to the escalating energy of rock concerts, Furnas conjures states of ecstasy as both joy and agony.
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