Notes on works from 2011 to the present.

In an ongoing series of works, I have chosen to use a relatively confined space in which to construct each scene and to simplify the elements within each image. Taking a reductive approach, my focus has been the placement and positioning of objects and figures in space (and in front of a camera) as a means to explore notions of gesture and intentionality within the process of image making. These works operate in an area between painting and photography, both in terms of the language that they employ and the process through which they have been made. All of the works are pigment prints on canvas with acrylic and oil paint. And the physicality of these works plays an important role in establishing a dialogue between painting and photography.

Both Untitled 7 and Untitled 9 employ different types of pictorial language within a single image. In Untitled 7, fragments of an interior (a stool, two drawing boards, the corner of a daybed and window) appear on the surface of a painted screen, creating an illusionistic space that hovers in front of the objects behind it. The screen and its painted image (seemingly transparent compared to the solid objects around it) could be read as a surrogate figure, bearing witness to the other objects. In Untitled 9, a partially seen object (a table) is used to interrupt our appreciation of the two coloured panels next to it, through its suggestion of a second, hidden space. In this work, as well as in Untitled 7, an emphasis is placed on the meeting point between physical objects and painted marks, in an attempt to intervene between the subject (the viewer) and the object in front of them (both the objects depicted and the object that is the canvas).

Paul Hodgson

Notes on works from 2008 – 2009.

Painting re-entered my work at around this time, when I began a series of works in which I combined paint with photographic and digital elements, focusing upon the material differences between them.

In the catalogue to my exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art London in 2010, the poet Andrew Motion used the phrase “honest doubt” as a possible “epigraph” to the show.

He goes on to describe how the large scale and bold presentation of the figure lifts a group of six pictures, towards a “heroic scale”, and continues by writing: “Yet in each of the six, what is conventionally regarded as heroic is countered by elements of doubtfulness, introspection and anguish. By the close of the series, indeed, we have been required to think that heroism might in fact arise from the struggle to embrace the opposite”.

The first work in this group of six pictures is entitled Dormant Figure (Portrait of Martin Luther).

Two things initially drew me to Luther as a subject. The first was the moral and intellectual certitude that he displayed in nailing the Ninety-five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg in 1517. Thereby initiating the Protestant Reformation.

The second was a reproduction of an engraving by Cranach the Elder, dated 1520, that depicts Luther as a young monk. This image was produced as propaganda for the cause, but rejected on the grounds that the deep-seated eyes aroused suspicion amongst some. As windows into the soul of the sitter, did they reveal a man who was experiencing strange fantasies? A man whose eyes (according to the Polish diplomat Dantiscus von Hofen) were “just like his books, sharp and glittering strangely, as in the case of possessed people”.

To my mind, the elements that sparked objection are exactly those that make the image so potent. Luther’s focus appears to be double edged, displaying both an admirable level of belief, and a narrowness of vision - the latter being betrayed, perhaps, in Cranach’s ‘naïve’ rendering of Luther’s right eye.

In taking Cranach’s engraving as a source, and reconstructing it in pale, bleached hues, with thick encrusted paint, my intention was to depict a head that had calcified and, by implication, the calcification of ideas within it.

Is it this transformation – from fluid to rigid - that causes his arm to lie heavily on his leg? An arm that, although static, appears full of latent action.

This work is a collage both of painted and photographic material. The process of making it began by photographing a model in the studio and using the images to begin a full sized painting and a series of studies. These paintings were then photographed and digitally collaged onto an image of the model and then printed onto a separate canvas – producing a digital pigment print. Areas of the initial full sized painting were cut and removed in order to incorporate sections of this digital print on canvas. I then continued to paint on the new, hybrid surface. Sometimes scraping back to reveal underlying information, sometimes cutting away further sections in order to introduce more of the photographic source.

Several of the figures in this body of work appear on the edge of action. To quote Andrew Motion again: “They catch their sitters at a moment of penultimacy”.

When deciding how to pose the figure in Binary (which was influenced in part by a sequence from the 1920 German Expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) I wanted to suggest the moment before a decision is made. A demarcation that might serve to separate two forms, two ideas - perhaps rendering one dark and one light. The figure’s classical looking head was deliberately chosen as a reference to antiquity, and was prompted by my interest in the Italian humanist, historian and statesman Leonardo Bruni (1369-1444). Of particular interest was his decision to label the period between the fall of the classical world, and his own time, as the Dark Ages. In doing so, he heralded a third and modern age, in which antiquity would be reborn to restore classical purity.

Having said this, it was not my intention to make an overt reference to this historical subject or, indeed, to make a history painting. Nor was it my intention to make a value judgement. My aim, rather, was to form a generic subject from a decisive moment in history; a subject that could be presented through the arrangement of pictorial elements - a subject that does not require either a historical text or an implied narrative in order to be appreciated. I think that the main subject of this work is the act of deciding. Black or white, right or wrong. A binary decision.

In terms of history painting, Dormant Figure (Portrait of Martin Luther) probably comes closest to this genre, through my having identified the subject of the picture in the title. It does not, however, depict an important event from history or mythology, (such as Luther actually nailing his Ninety-five Theses to the Castle Church door) which may have qualified it as a history painting.

I was attempting to communicate content through a certain economy of means -for the fabric of the picture to expose the decisions that had been taken in the process of making it. At the same time, for this economy of means to remain sufficiently open to the anomalous nature of the creative process. For there to be ample room for invention, for improvisation.

As much as I wanted to make use of pluralism in the work (different styles, techniques, materials etc.,) and use it to examine the value of my subjective response to the subject matter in these works, I did not want the finished works to appear as merely an arrangement of symbols or styles, waiting to be decoded by the viewer.

The work that I was making at this time could be described as a form of ‘meta-painting’, or ‘meta-image’ making. They are pictures about painting and about image-making. Paintings that are concerned with the limits of the subject

Paul Hodgson

Paul Hodgson – New works

Marlborough Fine Art, London

17 March – 23 April 2010

Catalogue introduction by Andrew Motion

This is the first significant gathering of new work by Paul Hodgson since ‘Cold Eye’, in which he responded to poems written by Dan Burt and collected in the book Searched For Text (2008). (Although not illustrated in the catalogue, the pictures in ‘Cold Eye’ are included in this show, and the book of the same name is published at the same time.) The phrase ‘Cold Eye’ comes from Yeats, and conjures an idea of detached clarity; in fact the ten images of the series found their most urgent life as they explored different kinds of uncertainty - ‘Keys to narrative’, as Hodgson says, ‘rather than narrative itself’. In the opening frame we are shown the enigmatic bust of a male head – in profile, on a stand in the corner of what appears to be a studio, with a photograph behind it of two little boys in a pram that is being wheeled by – we are not sure whom. A mother? Some other relative? A nanny? The photograph is cropped so as to keep us in the dark. In the second picture we find another photograph of children – slightly older in this case, but shrouded by a similar sense of mystery: Hodgson has pixilated or stippled the surface in order to confuse precise figuration, and thereby also to convey a sense of identity being masked or becoming diffuse.

Initially this compels us to think about the ways that experience in general can threaten our sense of who we are. But as the series progresses, we begin to identify a more precise reference. Burt’s poems are largely and unflinchingly concerned with Jewish suffering during the c20; so too are Hodgson’s pictures preoccupied by memories of oppression. In ‘Inquisition’, for instance, representations of General Pinochet and a figure in Papal dress gradually emerge from a steam-cloud which is at once opaque and bleaching. In ‘’Sie Kommt’ a more plainly-shown female figure suggests a more confident placement in the world, yet everything about her suggests someone on the brink of action, rather than finally committed to it. It is a theme Hodgson maintains with variations throughout the remainder of the series. Individual character is at risk; figures retreat from definition (or are surrounded by reminders of how much is indefinite); the ordeals of a single observant consciousness are reflected in the larger damages of an entire people; explanatory texts are likely to be ‘searched for’ rather than definitive.

Many of these themes return in the recent work that Hodgson is exhibiting in this present show. But the much larger scale of the images, and the much bolder presentation of the figures they contain (the mist has burned away) lifts them towards a heroic scale. Yet in each of the six, what is conventionally regarded as heroic is countered by elements of doubtfulness, introspection and anguish. By the close of the series, indeed, we have been required to think that heroism might in fact arise from the struggle to embrace its opposite. The power and originality of these pictures – let alone their stamp of humanity – has to do with the way in which their strong personalities include uncertainty. They catch their sitters at a moment of penultimacy – a time which greatly interested Tennyson, whose ideas about the faithfulness of honest doubting might form an epigraph to the show.

‘Dormant Figure’, based on a portrait of Luther by Cranach the Elder and, like most of the series, using a combination of paint and photographic information, is a case in point. At first glance the figure seems immensely powerful and dynamic – the representation of what Hodgson has called an ‘angel of change’. Yet there is wariness in the facial expression as well as conviction, just as there is also latency in the seated posture, rather than activation. In addition, the pale, heavy painting of the face suggests something posthumous (the skull beneath the skin), as does the way the back of the skull slides into shadow. And those oddly modern-looking details, the shoes, and the cuffs? Although they indicate a connection with our own time, and therefore say something about the robustness of Luther’s preaching, they also convey a sense of the vulnerable – of the ordinary human and fallible man persisting beneath the costume of conviction. It is the portrait of questions, as much as it is the picture of a man who thinks he knows the answers.

‘Re-form’ presents us with a similar paradox in different terms. Here a solitary female figure stares at us, hands on hips, in a classic pose of confident confrontation. Yet Hodgson’s intention is once again ‘to get to the core of what we are underneath, in our subjective self’ – and when we contemplate the withheld gaze (as if character has been protected by the heavily-painted face), and the cold intervention of the table-corner, we realise that the picture and the sitter retain as much about identity as they put forth. We can safely say that the woman looks uncomfortable with the fact of her depiction, and that a kind of strength shows in her refusal to become entirely comprehensible. But beyond that, most of her authority depends on her remaining unknowable: an emblem rather than a specific identity; a collection of elements, rather than a single narrative.

Discomforts latent in the show’s first two images are magnified in the third, ‘Kathedra’, in which the head is based on an engraving by Durer of one of Luther’s humanist contemporaries. Here, as elsewhere, the setting is dramatic and stage-like, as though filled (and more certainly executed) with complete conviction. But once again this air of authority is matched by its opposites. The empty stand, the seatless chair, the nervously-clenched right fist, the strangely-separate face: all these fill the canvas with uncertainties, and make us sense in the sitter an anxiety about the value of expression which more than matches the obligation to speak. And what about that background of green and blue, criss-crossed with branches? Does that prove that some natural process is breaking through the darkness, and will provide a resolution to the human conflict in the foreground? Its illuminations seem provisional and squeezed; they are too little to be reliable.

Just as they are again in ‘Binary’, where the interventions of the natural world occur on a larger scale, but where the pose of the sitter and the jutting table edge capture a stubborn awkwardness. Or more than merely awkwardness. The brooding figure proves an idea of concentration and mass, but he has adopted a pose that cannot be maintained indefinitely. His prayerfulness (if that is what it is) must end soon, and the time for decision and action must come. Action to what end we are not told – although, when we turn to the next image - ‘Untitled (Green and Blue’) - and to the final one of all - ‘Untitled (Yellow, Grey and Red’ ) -we are encouraged to belief that it must have some connection with the growing visibility and power of the natural world. The similar pose, composition and expression of the figures in these two pictures seems settled – not into complacency, but into a world in which what is invented and what is naturally given seem to co-exist more peaceably. In which doubtfulness about the value of a subjective response, about the reliability and value of expression, and about the authority of belief in general, is assuaged by pleasure in cyclical returns and natural structures.

And, of course, in the contemporary environmental context, by anxieties about the stability of those returns and structures. Taken all together, Paul Hodgson’s six new pictures make a powerful address to perennial questions about the self and its ability to articulate an identity, and about faith and its reasonable limits. Their gleams of confidence derive from what they prove about the persistence of human enquiry, and the endorsement of natural process. Their impressive melancholy flows from their sense of the fragility of those things.

Paul Hodgson

born 1972

Imperial War Museum, London, 2006

Paul Hodgson is a contemporary artist whose work restages and re-examines history and progress. The Somme brought new levels of mechanization and planning to warfare, elements that were to shape the worst conflicts and atrocities of the twentieth century, and that created a brutal and inhumane world for the new conscripts. In three new images, Hodgson uses actors and props, like the setting of a scene for a film, to reflect on these changes in sometimes surprising ways.

The demise of horsepower was symbolic of this new age. In Slippage a horse has fallen on the chalky soil of the Somme. The scene is strangely juxtaposed against the façade of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, itself an image of unchanging stability, power and influence, but which has been kicked and dislodged by the horse.

The first carriage in Train, now horseless, is loaded with shells, wheels and redundant harnesses but in the following trailer these are represented in the style of the new modern art: a changed world needing a new language to describe it.

Isaac Rosenberg, an artist and poet of Jewish descent was killed in 1918. In a man like Rosenberg, Hodgson imagines him alive twenty years on, a family photograph to hand, remembering the past and facing the unimaginable future of Europe.

Hodgson’s carefully constructed settings are a reminder that all images of the Somme seen by the British public, whether photography, film or painting, were made with a purpose. Whether it was Beadle’s drama or Bone’s eye-witness studies of daily life, images were created to tell a particular story, to reassure their audience of bravery and efficiency, or to disturb with scenes of death and destruction.

The sponsorship and employment of artists by the British Government marked a new stage in the official development and control of news and information. Hodgson’s photographs hang alongside Sargent’s Gassed, representative of the ambition and achievement of the British art schemes during the First World War.

Paul Hodgson

Marlborough Fine Art, London

9 January - 9 February 2007

Catalogue introduction:

‘A mirror with a memory’

Thus the 19^th century American writer Oliver Wendell Holmes characterised the Frenchman Niepce’s new picture-making process, which Niepce’s partner and backer Daguerre was to make known world-wide, in matter of a few years. Hodgson’s technically sophisticated mirrors to reality excavate memories and deeds from history, in order to re-present them in the light of contemporary critical, and continually-evolving, sensibilities.

The history of photography has been blessed with innovators. It was born from the interaction of art and science and - as all artistic and scientific endeavours should – it strove to uncover essential truths. Unlike its perceived rival, pure painting, photography was not obliged to accommodate a baggage of man-made rules and censures, imposed by an unbending authority such as the Church or the Academy, but it could still, if it chose, approximate or imitate the medium and the message of its rival. For 150 years since the rudimentary camera and its concomitant laboratory equipment became standardised and reproducible, the ambitions of its practitioners have extended photography’s technical frontiers and manipulated its narrative powers in ways in which its pioneers could never have foreseen. Its interaction and crossover with its rival, pure painting, has become ever more intricate and fascinating. With his training as an artist, Hodgson joins the company of innovative painters and printmakers in the 19^th century, who did much to explore the language and scope of this newly-discovered science: the dramatically honest portraits of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, the poetry of Julia Margaret Cameron’s softer-focussed sitter-subjects, and the pioneering, multiple-negative, allegorical tableaux vivants of Queen Victoria’s favourite, Oscar Rejlander.

Proceeding from a ‘traditional’ art school background – a fundamental, rigorous and, some might say, old-fashioned study of drawing and encompassing the human form – Hodgson had nevertheless caught up with contemporary concerns by the end of his Fine Art studies at Newcastle University. His work melded painting with photography, collage, and three-dimensional construction, and was beginning to address issues of public concern beyond the studio-based monologues which are a feature of solipsistic art-school teaching. These theatrical constructions, often from found materials, would then serve Hodgson as a basis for new painting subjects. Later, on the post-graduate printmaking course at the Royal College of Art, he tried to pare down the theatrical element of these constructions, in order to reassert control over his materials. But this still left him dissatisfied, so he began to collaborate with actors in full-scale settings, creating a modern, pared-down equivalent of those 19^th century tableaux vivants. Intellectually curious, and a magpie-reader as well, Hodgson’s sketchbooks began to fill with visual and written anecdotes and excerpts on both historical and contemporary themes, charting his thoughts and discoveries, and further fuelling his unashamedly eclectic researches, which traversed museum and gallery collections, into art history and material culture, and on to new and unexpected epiphanies with the help of the early 21^st century’s newest source of iconography, the already-evidently subversive, and genuinely democratic search engine, the internet. With this tool – a keyhole into the hierarchy-free world of knowledge and experience – artists join the world’s population, their demons and heroes, in exchanging ideas and hopes for change, and learning more about the diversity of views and beliefs which affect our ability to live together and to understand, tolerate and, ultimately, respect difference.

Already at the Royal College of Art he had found out and begun to work with Ian Cartwright, who correctly styled himself a digital fine art printmaker. In the canon of post-Romantic Western art there have been innumerable precedents for photography, collage and painting colonising printmaking, just as there have been for architecture invading theatre, theatre invading painting, and painting invading advertising, and indeed vice-versa. The sources and inspiration for Hodgson’s present work transcend those traditional boundaries and categories within conventional art histories, so that it is the work itself which must define its identity, rather than a preoccupation with the medium it uses. Although the surface appearance of his recent works may appear seductively familiar, the subjects encompass more than one level of purpose and meaning. They are neither one-dimensional polemics, nor mere pictorial translations of philosophical propositions. Each work stands first as a formally-satisfying visual composition, but whose subject or theme has the potential to open up other narratives or memories that belong to the collective experience, learning, and possibly also to the contemporary concerns, of the intellectually alert viewer.

In this spirit, Hodgson’s focus in recent years has been on historical epochs of expansion and transition, moments of great energy, but also of ambiguous merit: Empire and appropriation – with a subtext of exploitation and expropriation – which coincided with the first great age of Western scientific discoveries between the 17^th and 18^th centuries or (as recently seen in the group of works installed in the Sargent Room of the Imperial War Museum, commemorating the Battle of the Somme) the irony and tragedy of deeds and sacrifices publicly proclaimed as glorious, in the decade that followed the mainly Paris-centred convulsions in the Western traditions of literature, art and music. In Hodgson’s Train the Futurists’ iconoclastic glorification of war is literally transformed into a cart load of destruction and waste. In A Man like Rosenberg he imagined one of several poets of promise slain in the Great War surviving into the 1930’s, full of earnest but ageing melancholy, immured in solitude, fearful of the future as he foresees history repeating itself with even greater destructive power. Slippage recalls the pitiful end in the mud of Flanders of centuries of the noble horse as man’s charger and companion, witnessed by impotent officials of the stone-solid architectural Behemoth of international realpolitik, the Foreign Office. However, evoking thus briefly the informing idea cannot convey the impact of these large-scale works, of their formal composition, of their mood-setting tonality, or of the human narrative evident in the figures that inhabit them.

The spirit of these works belongs to the classical Humanist tradition, revived at the birth of the Modern Era, when the artist (and then, ipso facto, the patron too) was sufficiently versed in the themes of politics, philosophy and the moral sciences to imbue the composition with layers of meaning. At that time, the artist’s visual narrative assumed a familiarity with contemporary beliefs, and situated his works in a world view which incorporated echoes of poetic, literary or philosophical sources with which the patron and the educated viewer would be familiar. In this light, in Hodgson’s Sovereign Rights, Empire and Trade, aspects of 18^th century Europe’s buccaneering and often callous enterprise are reflected in the sophisticated visual language of the era.

In the first, the Vanity Portrait, uniformed and bemedalled, of the man of action - a former felon, promoted to Viceroy to rule over lesser races in Imperial style. In the second, a placid-looking, Watteau-inspired conversation piece set in a frozen landscape, belying the complexity of relationships, of innate pride and selfishness, rivalry and unrequited love, and indifference to the feelings of others. Here, Hodgson celebrates painting’s silent ability to portray the web of feelings where words no longer serve their purpose. The third displays the exotic allure of women waiting to please, adorned with the attributes of the triangles of trade that made Britain rich: in the East’s triangle, British manufactures sold to India undermined the native industries, but enabled Indian opium and cotton to be bought and traded to China, thus weakening that Empire’s self-sufficiency, and facilitating the export of its teas to Britain. Although the attributes of trade are evident – the manufactures, the textiles, opium and tea – the artist’s purpose points to the longue durée: the lack of morality in trade and its trampling of some (preferably remote) for the profit of others (preferably our own); the Ibsenesque complexity of relationships in societies that pride themselves on their seeming sophistication; the recurring ability of scoundrels to prosper and rehabilitate themselves in the midst of a civilisation that proclaims its moral rectitude. These are themes which transcend centuries and nations, contradictions which underline our frail humanity. Similarly, Late Berlin Interior, though quite specific in its location, mirrors in the isolation of the figure within the expansive emptiness of the apartment, the persistence of diasporas despite our legal, let alone humanitarian, entitlement to integrate and belong. Yet again, the atavistic attributes of ancestry and tribe triumph over man-made laws and their idealistic aims.

Often the origins of a work may be multiple, or simply difficult to pinpoint; Hodgson’s growing awareness of a shift in focus or perspective in the intellectual discourses of his age, such as over the issue of cultural ownership or restitution, the protection of cultures or peoples under threat of extinction, or the suppression of inconvenient, critical or hostile perspectives by those who lay claim to establish norms and write authoritative histories. His sketchbooks, library and research notes help to put flesh on an idea, and so his search may begin for the mise-en-scène. A keen theatre-goer, his visits are as much to see the drama itself, as to see the way a new designer has created a fresh interpretation to best illuminate the drama for a contemporary audience. Hodgson will be the author, designer, builder, director and producer for the installation he will photograph. He must therefore select the model or models, and discover or himself create the location, the clothes, the furnishings and accessories, the make-up and the lighting, and bring them all together for the day of the shoot. After all the time spent in preparations, it is not unusual for new ideas or angles to emerge as the cast assembles on site. There will be main takes and often also subsidiary shots, which may need to be inserted or manipulated at a later date. But only now can the production begin of the large-scale images he has laid down on disc. And this is not for a simple ink-jet or mechanically-processed colour print, but for a calibrated printing process with pigment inks, generated digitally from the disc, which permits him the same adjustments and afterthoughts as are given to a painter in front of his easel.

In the course of producing these large tableaux, forms may be altered, tones lightened or darkened, colours changed, details inserted, moved around or deleted, necessitating on occasion as many as fifty proofings until the artist is satisfied that the image matches his vision. Thus it is not surprising that some of the group exhibitions in which museum and gallery curators have included Hodgson’s work make little mention of the medium, but emphasise the content, style or approach to work of the artists featured. Such exhibition titles have included ‘Appearance’, ‘Working with light.’, ‘Assembly’, ‘Impositions’, ‘Reluctant creator’ and ‘In search of a new land’. This intellectually curious and alert artist reserves the right to change his mind, to change his priorities and his principles in the light of new insights and discoveries. Since the essence of Hodgson’s work is about looking, imagining and recreating, he is convinced that the process of making a work is bound to lead his thoughts on to the next project. The struggle involved in bringing a project to fruition almost always suggests fresh challenges to address in the next one. For Hodgson personally, this is the most satisfying reward he could hope to receive.

Philip Wright

Paul Hodgson

Feigen Contemporary

New York

14 April - 28 May 2005

The spot-lights are dim in Paul Hodgson’s studio, and time flows in reverse. While most photographer’s studios are places of flood-lit backdrops and the semblance of novelty, Hodgson’s is more like the hidden quarters of the medium’s unconscious. His photographs and films excavate earlier imagery from all manner of sources, from unique Old Masters as much as photographs that have reproduced a thousand times, and put them before us again as if they were fossils. If we recognise something in them, that is because the images are like echo chambers which allow us to hear the present reverberate in the present.

The group portrait Empire directly addresses of the central themes of Hodgson’s new series. In it he returns to the format of the eighteenth century conversation piece, a genre with a sweet informality but always enough hidden formality to mouth unspoken hierarchies and worldly ambitions. He borrows from Watteau, from a photograph of the family of Victorian writer John Ruskin holidaying by a frozen lake, and, as throughout the series, from Picasso. The theme of Clean the Floor might seem more opaque, but that also examines a union of art and empire, though this one darker: the models’ gestures might remind one of the figures in Millet’s Gleaners but they might as easily suggest some forced servitude, or images of contemporary brutalities.

Hodgson’s new pictures release these precedents reluctantly. That is because recovering the life of the images hidden in them is like reading from a fossil: you can be misled. You might think that Woman Leading Arab, an image of a woman grasping the reins of an Arabian horse, rehearses a painting by Picasso, Boy Leading a Horse, in the Metropolitan Museum: you would be right. You might think the feet-washing and urn motif in The Source is an echo of Ingres’ infamous nude: you would be wrong. But only in a sense, for it is every bit Hodgson’s intention to have us running up blind alleys, of thinking we remember things we don’t, of reading art and history backwards and forwards, and always listening for the new echoes.

Morgan Falconer 2005