Good Man / Bad Man

Turner is here concerned with measuring his own human tendency to interpretation against ours, presenting the lineaments of men’s faces as triggers first to his response, then to ours. By restricting this far more avowedly subjective sequence to a single gender (his own, not accidentally), Turner profoundly diminishes the potential for complications in our response, He has to: having complicated our process of apprehension with his own fabulations in this startlingly expressive, even expressionistic series, Turner needs to bring us back to focus – to focus, that is, on our own biases and presuppositions.

Who, asks Turner, is a “bad man” and who is “good” – and how can we tell who is who, simply from the signals their faces send us? We need, after all, to have a good idea about who might harm us and who might help us as early as possible in our relationships with them, and before actions speak and words are spoken, what do we truly know? Indeed, how hard-wired are we to read faces? How immediately? How deeply and intricately? What do we – each of us – really know about one another, or about the human visage in general? The more Ray Turner paints faces, the less he knows he knows and the more curious he gets – about faces, and about how we face the

- Peter Frank