Stephen Felton

The paintings of Stephen Felton (*1975) are initially astonishing in their simplicity. The individual freehand drawings on large-format canvas display a reduced colour palette and testify to an obvious speed of execution. This simultaneously gestural and fragmentary work is reminiscent of children's drawings and cave paintings as well as a kind of softly drawn pictogram, somewhere between symbol and icon, figuration and abstraction. Stephen Felton's series are usually inspired by a theme or a book, the grandiloquence of which contrasts with the means the artist uses for his painting. The exhibition at the Kunsthaus thus derives its iconography from treatises on various approaches to black magic that the artist has collected over several years.