Accompanying 18 exquisite reproductions of Robert Fones tromp l'oeil Head Paintings is an illuminating text by the artist. In it he discusses the process and evolution of each painting, bringing into view his continuing exploration of integrating the manufactured and natural worlds. The text further marks Fones focus on visual work with letterforms in what is a first in Canadian artist book publishing: for Head Paintings the artist has created a new typeface for the text. 'Fones-Caslon,' as the font is called - an enormous and remarkable undertaking - further asserts the book's uniqueness.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Fones was born in London, Ontario in 1949. He studied at the London Artists' Workshop in 1962, and at the H.B. Beal Secondary School (London) from 1967-1968. He has had regular solo exhibitions in Toronto at the Carmen Lamanna Gallery and at S.L. Simpson Gallery, where he is exhibiting new work in April, 1997. In addition, he had a solo exhibition at The Power Plant (Toronto), Robert Fones: Selected Works, 1979-1989 in 1989.
He has participated in several group exhibitions, including Photographic Inscription: Art from Toronto, Institute for Foreign Cultural Affairs (Stuttgart, Germany, 1990); Global Art: Progressive Artists Working in the Industrialized World, Brent Gallery (Houston, Texas, 1990); Selections from the John Labatt Limited Collection, London Regional Art and Historical Museums (London, 1989); Walls on Fire, YYZ Artists' Outlet (Toronto, 1988); and Focus: Canadian Art from 1960 to 1985, Art Cologne, 20. Internationaler Kunstmarkt (Cologne, Germany, 1986).
Robert Fones's work is in the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, The Canada Council Art Bank, London Public Library and Art Museum, and the National Gallery of Canada. In 1990 he curated the exhibition A Spanner in the Works for The Power Plant (Toronto), and he has written several articles and reviews for publications such as Parachute, Vanguard, Northward Journal, and most recently, an article on Donald Judd's work in Marfa, Texas in C Magazine. Robert Fones resides in Toronto.
Robert Fones's CV (text version only)
IN CONVERSATION
with Victor Coleman
Although Head Paintings is Robert Fones's fourth book project in collaboration with Stan Bevington and The Coach House, about twenty-three years have elapsed since the last one, The Forest City. When asked why he was so enamoured of the artist's book as a form Fones stated two main reasons: first, the book was simply a method of keeping the Head Paintings together as a coherent project, since some of the paintings were, happily, sold, and second, to document the exhibition at S.L. Simpson Gallery. Finally, it was an opportunity to integrate the font designed by the artist with his other production as a visual artist.
The text that accompanies the exquisite colour reproductions of the Head Paintings is more background information in regards the objects in the paintings than pure description, he says. Content wise, " the paintings have something to do with economics, the ambiguous exchange between people and people and people and machines." He has always been interested in industrial production as subject matter for his art production.
The font designed by Robert Fones for Head Paintings is based on a little known and never used type face that is purportedly the first ever sans serif font extant. Fones was interested in the evolution of sans serif type in typographic history. Although it appears that the type was never developed beyond its capital letters, even then Fones could not find an entire alphabet and had to design the lower case letters entirely from scratch. At the suggestion of typographer Stan Bevington, Fones learned to use the Fontographer software and assumes he will continue to develop his skills as a type designer in the future.
Head Paintings is also much more of a bona fide artist's book than his previous work with Coach House, where much of the material included in the earlier books existed in relation to their ephemeral nature and was seldom ever on exhibit. Some of Fones's icons from the seventies did become objects of display, as when he made an actual Can-D-Man cut-out and re-painted the Liquorice Allsorts Man as a gouache drawing. Much of his interest in the book as medium has to do with an intimate integration of text and visuals. His first book with Coach House, Kollages, was never exhibited - the work was done specifically for the publication (which consisted of loose collages gathered together in a box).
His most recent artist's book, Field Identification (Art Metropole 1985) investigates letterforms in another way through the use of a font called Interstate, familiar to any driver as the font used for highway signs in North America and around the Globe.
