Atlanta-born painter Chris Hood works back to front. Using wet oil pigments, he lets form and colour soak through to the other side of his vast canvases, which he then flips and stretches to create the final work. There is a chancy, disorienting edge to this process that Hood embraces. ‘The canvas becomes this layer – a screen, if you will – that has a distancing effect for the viewer … the paint itself has a staining look. It does this thing with the brushstrokes, and seepage, and changes the viewer’s ability to read normal cues of painting’. He compares the appearance of works like Static Compression, shown in the 2018 Saatchi exhibition ‘Known Unknowns’, to that of a graphic t-shirt turned inside out. Its psychedelic, hazy imagery represents an art-historical collision: the colourful abstract swirls of the background are derived from Van Gogh’s Starry Night, a culturally ubiquitous painting with weighty emotional associations, while the grimacing cartoon thunderclouds are part of a menagerie of mascots that he finds in clip art, gifs and online ads. He explains that ‘as dumb as they are, emojis are also beautiful pictograms. They reflect the way people have been using images to transmit ideas for millennia. They’re perfect little icons with a big ability to communicate’. Bringing these disparate elements together before reversing the picture plane, Hood creates compositions of surprising beauty and subtlety, forcing us to look with fresh eyes at the visual languages of art history and beyond.
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