Francis Schuck

I started marking surfaces before I knew what any of it meant, writing on subway cars and platforms before I'd ever set foot in a gallery. Queens was my canvas. That's where I learned gesture and urgency, and I'm still working in that same language thirty years on. The spray can turned into paint, ink, thread, scratched line. A mark on a surface is like a letter before it becomes a word, and most days I'm still more interested in the letter than the sentence it's supposed to build toward.

My work runs in two directions that look opposed but come from the same place. One is decorative abstraction on reclaimed bed linens: staining, scraping, stitching into fabric that already carries a history, sleepless nights, romantic tussles, longing, joy, death. The other is figurative, pulled from forced consumerism, false ideals of beauty, sex and youth used as weapons, the male gaze turned back on itself, despite me being a man. Both come from the same instinct, being drawn to a surface or an image that already has something in it before I touch it.

I don't have a cause. I'm not trying to argue anything. The work isn't built around a theme or a narrative, it's built around the pleasure of making: painting, marking, scraping, staining, stitching. But the figurative pieces look like they're telling a story, or making a point about how we market innocence, brand identity, and mistake nostalgia for truth. Maybe they are, even though I'm not putting it there on purpose. I don't try to resolve that. The abstraction and the storytelling just sit next to each other.

If I'm honest, the abstraction tells more stories than the figurative work does, even though the figurative pieces are the ones that look like they have something to say. The marks aren't there to show off technique. They're there to find moments of perfection, and I don't mean the polished kind. I mean a small imperfection, a blending of color, a gesture that lands in a way no one else would ever notice or go looking for. Those moments hold my father, my own path, my fears, layered in without announcing themselves.

Abstraction has always scared me more than the figurative work ever has. People assume marks and color are the easy part, that skill only shows up when an image is recognizable, when it gets close to photographic. That's what scares me, being judged on a perception of skill I never set out to display. I want the viewer to finish the piece, to bring their own narrative to it, to find their own place inside the act of making it. The viewer always finishes my work, which is another way of saying it's never finished.

I've been at this for thirty years and I'm still searching for whatever it is I'm circling. These works are where I am right now, not a destination, just a continuation of the same urgency that started on a subway platform in Queens.