interview by Simon Sellars

Originally published on Sleepy Brain, 25 April 2003.

Melbourne artist Juan Ford is on a hot streak, his recent paintings blending innovative technique with spiritual enquiry, unlocking the unfathomable mysteries of human existence. Aligning his work with recent debates on the ethics of cloning, Ford attempts to bring religious debate into the – quite literally – “soulless” technological era. If there is such a thing as a soul, he challenges, what happens to it when we eventually get round to cloning humans: will the clone be an empty copy, devoid of this spiritual life force? Or can our souls be replicated, stamped out in endless versions? Ford splits his human subjects in two and leaves them to fend for themselves amid geometric, biomechanical landscapes and grids, the visual language of computers, dreams and technology in overdrive. The results are playful and wise, tinged with a little melancholy…

You studied engineering but never finished the course. How did you lever yourself from that to becoming a full-time painter, arriving at your particular “photorealistic” style?

It’s a really stupid story. When I was about 20 I liked to draw. A friend of mine had started up a shop selling basketball cards. These cards were “in” for a while and he was cashing in on that and we were in class together. He said to me, “Here, take these magazines, they’ve got pictures of Michael Jordan in them. I want you to draw Michael Jordan for these cards”. And I thought, “Yeah, why not? I haven’t drawn for a while”. Suddenly I’ve got these photoreal, quite good drawings of Michael Jordan and it took me completely by surprise that I could do this.

So that was enough incentive to give engineering away completely?

Yeah. Plus I started hanging around with Fine Art students and they were more fun.

Today, photorealism is still characteristic of your work. What appeals to you about this technique?

It’s not just about mimicking photographs. In fact it’s really difficult to describe. These paintings take a long time to do and demand a lot of concentration. You get an incredible sense of satisfaction when you pull it off and I guess that’s the motive. There are all sorts of theoretical considerations in doing what I do but my interests aren’t just limited to photorealism. I’ve done installations involving cylindrical anamorphosis, where you put a cylindrical mirror on top of an image that’s been manipulated and the image comes up clearer in the mirror, when it didn’t prior to that. I like to use a lot of visual, spatial tricks.

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