GAVIN RAIN

Gavin Rain, the artist that gives birth to iconic portrays mixing coloured portrays and science!

Behind every Gavin Rain’s painting there are, at least, two or three weeks of preparatory studies. The South African artist, strongly influenced by Pointillism, paints with a mathematical approach where forms are broken down and recomposed with the help of a grid and a projector. The results are artworks that, closely, look purely abstract while, from afar, come out and reveal themselves in their figurative shape and essence.

Gavin Rain, like a magician, transforms coloured concentric circles into seductive Marylin Monroe, in Liz Taylor, in Monnalisa and also in Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize 1991. This neuropsychology-graduated artist, in love with analogue photography, painted also Lottie, Kate Moss’s equally rebel sister and many normal people that, through his artworks, have become iconic.

With prices getting higher and higher and countless personal exhibitions around the world, the artist took part in renowned international Art Fairs like Art Miami, Tefaf, Art New York and Cape Town Art Fair. His artworks deliver an inspiring message for his public: taking some time to reflect and to understand better the multitude of imagines that, every day, reach the human being. Gavin Rain’s paintings tell us that perception and comprehension are just two sides of a coin, a coin we call knowledge. The artist warns us against looking at things without understanding them, an attitude that can mislead in the same way as we are not able to become aware of the beautiful faces of his paintings without the right distance.

In order to create artworks with this double perception, the South African artist build his own and unique approach. The process begins with a sketch, or a photograph, that is broken down into different areas with the help of a grid and a projector. Each area is, later, filled up with coloured circles, whose shades are chosen from 1400 sample, accurately made to be seen distinctively closely and to create the illusion of one colour, from away. This single colour, indeed, draws and outlines the subjects of Gavin Rain’s Painting: Marylin, Liz Tayolor. The circles’ size is important as well: the bigger the circle the more shaded the painting, the smaller the circle the more lighted the painting.

Gavin Rain’s paintings are influenced by the pointillism’s pioneer, Seurat, by the Russian Constructivism and by the Bauhaus’s belief that colours are misleading The presence of human figures isn’t just a Pop reference, or the result of a mathematical trick, but it is also a deep message for his public. Rain tells us that the people need other people to live with and to feel and perceive the reality.

While more and more collectors want his artworks (Gavin Rain makes also lots of commissioned paintings), the artist is already thinking about his next series, a range of wooden sculptural paintings where the thickness and the texture of the wood empowers the double effect: closely abstract and figurative from afar.