Biography
Ian Gonczarow is an ardent keeper of a sketchbook. All the paintings he produces undergo an incubus period there. Awkward compositions of all the kitsch and crap of popular culture appear in faux dialectic provocations alongside the art and political worlds 'greatest hits'. The urgency of the flippant or vaguely political juxtaposition is his fixation, alongside the potential converging narratives therein. Referents to current socio-political turmoil are cut and covered, removed and then re-drawn. A proposal of connectivity is suggested during painting in a sense that 'you should know what this combination means'. Tightly controlled areas of painting jam up against small glimmers of the will for expressionistic gusto and its associated paraphernalia of cluttered, drawn out brush-marks and signature drips. Lurid, cartoon-influenced colour palette and the flattening of pictorial space form a layer of stasis in which selected images hang, giving these scenarios the will to represent, but not truthfully reproduce, a political stance.
