Expressive Figuration: Keith Ross at Transitions
Keith Ross, ‘I got what you need’ 2025, Pencil on black card, 2025, 41 cm x 28.5 cm, $300.
Romulus Folio Gallery, South Melbourne
In the current group exhibition Transitions at Romulus Folio Gallery, artist Keith Ross presents a series of pencil on card works that explore emotional truth through expressive figuration.
Ross’s drawings deliberately depart from realism. Bodies are skewed, facial features exaggerated, and colour used intuitively rather than descriptively. This approach aligns with traditions of Cubist-expressionist figuration, where form is fractured and reassembled to convey psychological intensity without than visual accuracy. In Ross’s work, distortion becomes a language of feeling, allowing emotion to surface through line, proportion, and chromatic shifts.
The resulting images feel immediate and vulnerable. Figures appear held in moments of tension or quiet introspection, their emotional states made visible through a visual grammar that privileges expression over representation.
Naïve Resonance
There is an almost naïve quality to Ross’s mark-making, one that is carefully sustained rather than incidental. Line is allowed to remain open, anatomy elastic, and colour unconstrained by realism. This openness gives the drawings their clarity and emotional directness. Rather than striving for refinement, Ross embraces immediacy, producing works that feel instinctive and human.
Working in pencil on card, Ross uses a medium that reinforces this sensibility. Pencil offers sensitivity and speed, while the card surface provides a grounded, tactile support. The works retain the trace of the hand, carrying the sense that they have been discovered through looking rather than constructed through control.
Positioning Within Transitions
Curated by Angelina Mirabito, Transitions brings together artists whose practices explore states of movement, change, and becoming. Within this context, Ross’s drawings locate transition within the body itself. Emotional shifts are registered through posture, gesture, and expression, suggesting that transformation often begins internally before it manifests externally.
While other works in the exhibition engage materially or spatially with change, Ross’s contribution offers an intimate psychological counterpoint. His drawings ask viewers to slow down and attend to feeling, reminding us that transition can be subtle, quiet, and deeply embodied.
Viewing the Work
Keith Ross’s pencil on card works are currently on view as part of Transitions at Romulus Folio Gallery, The Gladstone, South Melbourne, until 25 January. The works invite close viewing and reward attention through their expressive economy and emotional resonance.
Original works are available for acquisition.
Romulus Folio Gallery 55 Gladstone Street,
South Melbourne, 3205, Victoria, Australia
Wednesday - Friday 12 - 7pm
Saturday & Sunday 12pm - 5pm
By appointment
Written by Angelina Mirabito, PhD