These photographs act as starting points, rather than visual guides: in some works, the act of photography is encoded in the canvas as horizon lines, water and the haze of salt hanging in the air are subsumed by flashes of incandescent glare. This dissolution of landscape into atmosphere is evocative of Whistler’s infamous Nocturnes, in which visual phenomena seem to evaporate into abstracted carriers of feeling.  

Layered onto the glow of light and water are reflections of objects from Franzen’s studio: gossamer renderings of mementos and found objects, carriers of personal narrative. In earlier paintings, decoy owls - fixtures in the homes of his parents and grandparents - recur; here, they appear draped in fabric, ghostly forms superimposed onto the painted seascapes. The black cat featured in two of the paintings in Partial Truth refers to a childhood game he and other kids would play around their neighbourhood: they would stick two dimes over the eyes of a cardboard cutout of a black cat and place them by the roadside, so that car headlights would reflect off the coins and illuminate them like the dilated pupils of a real cat in the dark. Veiled and translucent, these tokens of Franzen’s personal history act as oblique proxies for the artist’s own presence within the work, gazing out at the sunset from behind glass.  

The infusion of the artist’s immediate surroundings into his paintings is felt through the scratches and incisions he makes into the painted surface, using razors, pins and keys found in and around his studio. Each intervention into the smooth gloss of the airbrushed paint creates the effect of a patina or weathering like the crust of salt on windscreens and surfboards, a surface quality that Franzen describes as characteristically Southern Californian. In puncturing the surface of each work, Franzen draws attention to the membrane that separates the pictorial world from our own, foreclosing an immediate immersion into the scene. Instead, he creates a distance between the viewer and the world represented in his paintings, an echo of the gap created between the actuality of a place and a memory of it. Within Partial Truth, sunsets go beyond themselves: like eyes squeezed shut after lying in the sun or a glimpse of sea through a dusty car window, Franzen’s paintings capture the subtle inflection of sense impressions filtered through interiority.  

Christian Franzen (b. 1994) is an artist based in Los Angeles, CA. He received his BFA from California State University Long Beach in 2018. He has participated in group exhibitions at In Lieu (Los Angeles), Sow & Tailor (Hong Kong), and James Cohan (New York), among others. Following a solo presentation of work at Frieze London last year with In Lieu Gallery, this is Franzen’s debut solo exhibition in the UK.