Hazel Friedman
‘I FIRST encountered Phillip Hunt’s ”blobs” in a group exhibition – Intimations of Millennium held at Newtown Galleries in 1995. Even then, they were extraordinary. Thick, tactile tar-like paint sploshes and spillages that invited visceral responses like licking or scratching …
They featured in works consisting of photographic emulsions of sculpted classical deities, decontextualised from museums and sullied by graffiti and paint sploshes. At the time, Hunt’s work was more than an essay on the tension between past and present, abstraction and classical figuration. It seemed to be about the symbiotic relationship between the sacred and profane. Simultaneously it seemed to tread a precipitous path of desire, violation, and violence, poignantly tapping into the tragedy of human experience at the end of the millennium.
The next time I saw his work (April 1996 at the Rembrandt Galleries) it had veered decidedly in favour of the baser aspects of human experience. Thematically, it revolved around hotel rooms and play-now-pay-later rituals in which passion and pain become as entangled as the bedsheets on which the rites took place.
It still consisted of photographic emulsions covered by a muddy layer of paint which – like a veil – served merely to suggest the opaque forms behind it. But the violent sploshes of red provided more than a hint of desire, decadence and death.
His next show at the Goodman Gallery – after a brief return from New York, where he is now based – seemed to encapsulate less about desire than the gap between intention and realisation.
The problems lay not so much in his larger paintings with their mellifluously poetic titles than in the smaller, framed canvases. Like their monumental counterparts, the latter consisted of details of decontextualised classical sculptures reproduced on worn cracked canvas strips, their rough edges folding over like pieces of aged parchments. Encased in glass like museum exhibits they suggest the futile attempt to contain and immortalise history.
But they were lacquered and mannered, definitely more about formula than feeling. And the bitty way in which they were assembled spoke less of the fragility and ephemerality of human existence than eleventh-hour sloppiness on the part of the artist.
In fact the only memorable parts of the show were those extraordinary blobs. Their violently succulent surfaces helped distract the viewer from the conceptual fatigue characterising the rest of his work.
But Hunt at the Hnel Gallery in Cape Town is an artist reborn. His work consists of photographic prints and manipulated negatives on photographic paper, covered by a layer of acrylic or powdery charcoal. dust. In these works, Hunt evokes once again the subtle tensions between the photographic and the painterly through his layered visceral surfaces and – once again – those thick, relief-like blobs.
He is unashamedly preoccupied with paint and the expressionist shapes that emotions assume, immersing himself in the alchemic – almost primeval – process of marksmanship.
And even though his work might appear anachronistic within the context of fashionable contemporary art that continues to debunk the notion of visual seductiveness, Hunt has come into his own, making art that is less about conceptual function or formula, and more about feeling.
— Philip Hunt’s exhibition is on at the Hnel Gallery in Cape Town until August 2