Will Fice: Can You Hear The Rain?

Following a two-year hiatus, Will Fice returns with Can you hear the rain?, an exhibition of ten new paintings in which focus is shifted away from the male group dynamics that Fice has painted in the past, and onto lone individual men. The tone is more sombre than before, registering the impact of changing circumstances in Fice’s personal life – Fice recently became a father and lost his mother. Interaction is replaced by introspection, and this is carried over into formal choices: hue and pattern are reined back, in a deliberate push against the brightly coloured graphic style that Fice had employed in his previous exhibition, Beautiful Losers.

Encountering the introverted figures in Can you hear the rain?, we might wonder if these are the same young men who populated Fice’s earlier work. No longer climbing trees or congregating in huddles, they appear to have parted and returned home alone. Together they killed time, smoked, drank, checked their phones – activities that could be continued individually, and yet all those activities are absent from the moments pictured in Can you hear the rain? We don’t even see a symbolic shadow or mirror image to hint at the multiplicity of a divided self. Instead, we’re presented with the human figure as a single self-contained unity, giving very little away. In the words of Aesop Rock: I pull my hood down, I got some walls up.

 

Expression or introversion? Fice seems caught between the two, as the desire to communicate locks horns with an equally strong impulse to deflect and disengage. Bodies in these paintings are subject to distortion and heightened unnatural colour effects – the classic tools of expressionist painting used to convey heightened emotions by artists since the beginning of the last century (or further back still, if we include El Greco). But in Can you hear the rain?, these expressionist tendencies are held in tension by an unassuming body language of withdrawal. Arms are folded, heads turn away, and even the more open poses appear noncommittal. The only gesticulation in the exhibition is a single pointing finger, loosely gesturing beyond the frame, following the direction of the owner’s impassive thousand-yard stare.

 

Fice taps into art’s mysterious and long-established connection between melancholy and elongation. We might ask: Why the long face?, as the very features that would usually clarify facial expression have been blurred into inscrutability. If eyes are the windows to the soul then these faces are mostly boarded-up buildings, with who knows what contained behind their blank facades. Most don’t appear to breath the air around them, nor do they disturb it by uttering a sound. They don’t see us, but we see them, which is the normal way of things with paintings, accentuated here with a curiously intimate sense of voyeurism. It’s like we’re watching someone sleep: so close, yet so far away.

 

Meeting the resistance of faces that are barely there, our attention falls instead to the hands, which are prominent in almost all the paintings here. Strong, large and heavy, they recall the sturdy working-class hands of twentieth century social realist pictures by Käthe Kollwitz, Ben Shahn, Peter Howson and Beryl Cook. But now these hands appear to be left hanging, evolved to grapple with a challenging material world, but increasingly made redundant by twenty-first century technology. (In this regard, there is a subtly optimistic synergy between these images of hands and the skilled manual labour that was required to render them on canvas – a quiet self-referential celebration of craft.) With nothing much to do, it is perhaps inevitable that these hands turn on themselves, picking idly at their own nails, or clasped in what might be an act of self-soothing. 

 

Shortly before work on Can you hear the rain? was completed, the film maker David Lynch died. Fice doesn’t cite Lynch as an influence but there are striking parallels. Most obvious are the red velvet curtains that can be seen in two of Fice’s paintings here, and which were also a recurring motif in Lynch’s film and television work – especially Twin Peaks’ ‘red room’, an extradimensional zone where human characters where occasionally allowed to visit, sometimes in dreams, to interact with spirits. The red room’s velvet curtains appear to substitute for walls, creating an impression of somewhere uncannily familiar yet ominously undefined. Similarly, in Fice’s paintings the presence of red velvet curtains evokes an architectural space for the figures to occupy (“timeless and nameless places”, in Fice’s words), without nailing down exactly what kind of location this might be: public or private? A dressing room or a stage? Maybe neither. Any promise of theatricality seems thwarted by the men’s unwillingness to perform for us. There is feeling here, but no drama.

 

In the sparest paintings, Fice’s figures are set against nothing more than a subtly modulated colour field, like a photographer’s backdrop. The formal duality of figure and ground becomes a theme in itself, with the absence of environmental detail emphasising the figures’ introspective disconnection from their surroundings. Decorative patterns are allowed to inject rhythm here and there, but their careful rendering imbues them with an ornamental restraint. Meanwhile clothing and bodies are painted with an almost sculptural attention to the modelling of form, with one pose even recalling Rodin’s Thinker. This treatment conjures the illusion of physical presence, even as the smudging of faces insists on a more spectral passing through. 

 

Passing through to where? Some of these paintings present settings that suggest home (or hotel) interiors, albeit distilled to a pictorial shorthand that looks back to Cézanne and the early modernist approach to surfaces that paved the way for Cubism. In these snug nooks, consisting more of painterly homage than observed reality, Fice renders clothes and soft furnishings to appear thickly enveloping, like things to take comfort in. He conjures for us a series of box rooms haunted by youthful ghost-faced occupants, striking an unusually warm melancholic chord with Björk’s 1993 hymn to solitude, Play Dead, in which she claims: It's sometimes just like sleeping, curling up inside my private tortures, I nestle into pain, hug suffering, caress every ache. 

 

Matt Lippiatt, artist and freelance writer - February 2025