Artist statement

Canadian–South African artist John Faul is a contemporary figurative painter whose work explores the emotional and psychological experiences embedded within the human body. Centering the figure as both subject and vessel, Faul’s paintings probe the intimate terrain of embodiment—how the body holds memory, trauma, vulnerability, and resistance. Working primarily in oil and acrylic, his practice is shaped by personal grief and the enduring weight of depression, lending his work both urgency and tenderness.

Faul's figures are not passive forms but charged sites of introspection and critique. His paintings confront the ways contemporary culture sexualizes, medicates, and disassociates the body, while also reclaiming it as a space of agency and emotional truth. Through layered gesture and expressive abstraction, he renders what it feels like to inhabit a body under pressure—to endure, to ache, and to become. His work invites the viewer not just to observe, but to feel through.