Focus: Chris Hood
21 April – 19 May, 2020
Chris Hood’s paintings depict layered arrangements of images set against fields of stained color, scattered landscape vignettes, picturesque vistas, “clip art”-style icons and simplified central figures. Painted from behind as opposed to from the front, Hood works in a reverse layering process — as each layer dries it seals the surface, blocking the successive layers from penetrating the canvas. The imagery appears to fracture, double, and dissipate amongst the surfaces. Drawn from an archive of personal photographs, self-portraits, advertising imagery and anatomical studies, the figures that Hood paints seem to be in a trancelike state — dreaming, sleepwalking, or hypnotized — suggesting that the disparate images that make up the compositions may be organized by dream logic or governed by a series of undetermined associations.
“I was looking for a way to ‘break’ the painting. To have friction built into the material look of it as well as in the imagery. The best painters have always found a back door in. At one point I made a small group of t-shirt paintings that I stretched with paint-covered hands. The graphics, turned inside out, along with the fluid painterly swaths of color hit a certain place for me that I wanted to keep exploring. I was particularly trying to forge a relationship between thinness in paint and a kind of evaporating or veiling image. I also wanted to develop a personal voice with my work as a stark contrast to the silent, assured contentment I find in much abstract painting. The voice is not necessarily my own voice but I write a lot to build its vocabulary and cull up very personal experiences I can translate in a universal way. So this is something like a method I suppose, building an archive of expressive anomalies. I make lots of lists- its a kind of lateral thinking.”
CHRIS HOOD
Split Cave, 2019
Alkyd on canvas
72 x 58 in
(182,9 x 147,3 cm)
CHRIS HOOD
Ersatz Disaster, 2019
Alkyd on canvas
84 x 66 in
(213,4 x 167,6 cm)
“While I’m working I tend to think of hybridizing these forms. The imagery originates as something kind of personal, from my own photography, or drawings, or things that I’ve found, you know, as I go about my life, but they tap into an archetype - an image that we all can come to. And often within my process I am going back and forth between sketches, perhaps even found imagery, my own personal imagery, sometimes I make collages of these things. And so there’s a kind of bringing myself and a kind of archetype, the imagery of my own life, and the archetypal ones go together that I use within the paintings. And then as they are developing, there’s also these few things that happen, where I continue the hybridizing of the imagery as they unfold out of my mind, and also from these developed processes of quoting from the outside world and using my own energy.”
CHRIS HOOD
Magic Mountain II, 2020
Watercolor, ink, collage, pencil, and resin on paper
24 x 18 in
(60,96 x 45,72 cm)
CHRIS HOOD
Magic Mountain III, 2020
Watercolor, ink, collage, pencil, and resin on paper
24 x 18 in
(60,96 x 45,72 cm)
CHRIS HOOD
Untitled, 2020
Watercolor, ink, collage, pencil, and resin on paper
12 x 9 in
(30,48 x 22,86 cm)
$ 1,500 excl. tax, framed
CHRIS HOOD
Untitled, 2020
Watercolor, ink, collage, pencil, and resin on paper
12 x 9 in
(30,48 x 22,86 cm)
$ 1,500 excl. tax, framed
CHRIS HOOD
Untitled, 2020
Watercolor, ink, collage, pencil, and resin on paper
12 x 9 in
(30,48 x 22,86 cm)
CHRIS HOOD
Untitled, 2020
Watercolor, ink, collage, pencil, and resin on paper
12 x 9 in
(30,48 x 22,86 cm)
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Chris Hood (b. 1984) is a painter that lives and works in Los Angeles. He holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He has had solo exhibitions at Lyles & King, New York, US; Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, US; and Galerie Bernard Ceysson, Paris, FR. Group exhibitions include The Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, GA; Venus Over Los Angeles, Los Angeles, US; CANADA, New York, US; Saatchi Gallery, London, UK; and Jack Hanley, New York, US among others. Hood's work has been featured in Art in America, Elephant, Galerie, Mousse, The Art Newspaper, Wall Street International, Time Out New York and New American Paintings.