Social Portrait meditates on the dominance of image culture in contemporary life. The subject matter is gleaned from social media platforms to create a vocabulary of the ways in which we see and are seen on the web. It encourages us to reflect on what these images reveal about our culture and ourselves.

Fletcher reflects:

By transporting these digital images to the realm of fine art and painting, the exhibition raises a series of questions; is the way we choose to view images significant? How is contemporary society documenting itself? And does painting add value to these images? 

How many images do we upload every day? The Internet has become a repository of an endless archive of everyday moments. From what we’re having for breakfast to an artfully arranged selfie to the just-right light on an afternoon cloud. However the scale of these collections is so vast as to make each individual image unimportant and impermanent. Fletcher’s treatment of the subject takes a critical view to this habit and subverts it, each carefully worked painting invigorates these quotidian moments with a new kind of permanence. The photo-realistic paintings are an invitation to consider each subject thoughtfully and to take time with it, not just scroll through screens with the flick of a finger.

The artist riffs on the role of painting and high art in the image saturated world we occupy. These works are a joyful testament to the primacy of the painted form in a disposable world. He takes this investigation to the extreme in his pixel works, zoning in on the very make up of our visual culture and in doing so rendering it abstract.