Anytime Now

New Art Projects, London

4 March 2021 - 26 June 2021

By Christabel Stewart

“Some painters start with a vision and then go to work […] The burning question here is not what to paint, or even why to paint now, but how to: not a problem (problems are for the experts, the historians) but a constantly renewed, lived question of tactics and techniques. How to paint now, in a world ordered by visual communication and, consequently, drained of what the Eskimos called visions? Or how to free the practice and processes of painting from the imperative of merely communicating the word’s visual order back to itself, and restore their potential to make it see again?” John Kelsey, ‘Big Joy Time’, Rich Text: Selected Writing for Art, 2010.

For Alex Hudson, this question of ‘how to’ becomes, ‘what should painting do? ‘And in avoiding ‘merely communicating the world’s visual order back on itself,’ he scrutinises painterly imagery itself. His practice often details ‘paintings within paintings’ giving us an active assemblage of the world via a historical patchwork of pre-existing painted imagery, those coding’s revisited with a contemporary vista. In this body of work, the imagery Hudson uses to develop the composition and content of a given painting, come from his own experience of looking at painting, primarily from the Dutch Golden Age to early moments in the twentieth Century. His focus here falls on human portraiture, bodily contortion, landscape and animalia, adeptly and curiously sampling key moments in the art historical archives of painting. Evident in these is an interest in revisiting social mores such as societal titles, costume, and man’s relationship to domestic and rare animals -once suggestive of social status- which embellish interests in notions of nomadism, ‘self-care’, and the symbolism of memento mori, the fantastical and the mythical. 

In his large-scale painting ‘Plato’s Bus’, Hudson has framed an expansive Breughelesque landscape with details from a vehicle’s interior, angled so that we see the steering wheel, a festoon of hanging bunting, and a dashboard of quotidian objects –extinguished cigarettes and candles, a coloured light ball- and view the rest of the landscape through the windscreen itself. The title is a reference to the allegory of Plato’s Cave which presents the philosophers’ fundamental belief that the world revealed by our senses is not the real world but only a copy of it, and that the real world can only be apprehended intellectually. In painting representations of previous depictions of humanities views, concerns and foibles, Hudson himself takes us down a route of questioning pictorial veracity, belief-systems a journeying within imagistic possibility. Picking landscape styles of the Northern Renaissance, evokes a time when there was a steady rise in secular subjects in art: the most fundamental factor in enhancing this was the urbanisation of European society where most of the population was already located in cities and towns rather than on the land. Art patrons from the mercantile and professional classes developed their interest in works of art that reflected everyday lives and values, leisure time and the sheer pleasure of physical sensation. In re-occupying this subject matter, re-edifying its style and character, Hudson is reigniting a further parallel with what the van life itself stands for, as symbolic of the off-grid nomadic lifestyle, a free-er nomadic existence, perhaps even the idea of the artist as cultural nomad, closer to nature, by the simplest of means, sought by people exhausted by contemporary capitalisms mental health eroding inequalities. 

‘The Baron’, quotes distinctly from two mythological paintings each depicting scenes from Greek mythology. Very clearly present is the angered swan from Jan Asselijn’s ‘The Threatened Swan’ of 1650, a bird with vast outstretched wings and arched neck to protect her nest of eggs from a dog. The other is ‘Hylas and the Nymphs’, 1896 an oil painting by John William Waterhouse depicting a moment from the Greek and Roman legend of the tragic figure Hylas in which the enraptured youth is abducted by Naiads -a type of female freshwater ‘nymphs’ of legend, generally perceived as personifications of nature, while seeking drinking water. In Hudson’s version, a male is centre stage, but rather than be beguiled and drawn into the water to his untimely death, he uses the females as ballast while pushing strongly down on two of their heads to perform an extreme gymnastic V-sit manoeuvre that thrusts his legs vertically upwards, so his bare feet are raised above his head. Encased in striped fabric that appears almost flag like – the straightened legs as pole, the red, yellow, and dark stripe could evoke the Belgian flag, or the stripes of a circus performer. The figure remains otherwise unclothed, and sporting a specific and dandyish curled moustache, as he contorts over the pond of lily, reeds, swan, and nymph creatures. 

Another painting clearly mirrors this pose, in a slightly more comedic mood. A central female human figure thrusts her legs upwards above her head, curling one foot behind her head and the other to the side. She is clothed in a simple leotard type costume of gaudy animal print with matching headband, but the scene she otherwise occupies appears to be coded with sexuality. A cut melon, peaches and bananas sit near the figure’s own pubis, which peaks out due to the pose. The title ‘Pheasant Pluckers Daughter further plays on an English folklore rhyme that is quoted as a rude tongue twister. Also prevailing are the elegant exotic birds, very reminiscent of the arrangements and style of celebrated Dutch painter Melchior d’Hondecoeter – and specifically the cut fruit arrangement in his ‘Peacocks’ of 1683- an artist who exclusively painted images of birds, often in conflict or under threat. 

A third in a trio of compositional parallels, contorted solo figures surrounded by animals is ‘Old Habits Die Hard’. Four monkeys are actively playing around the bent over legs and feet of another Lycra clad animal print wearing human, this time the athleisure is paired with another contemporary wellness accessory – a mini purple ‘lifestyle’ neoprene dumbbell. A tortoise is placed in the foreground, and the whole scene is set in another pastoral landscape. The monkey has harboured many emblematic meanings, from the Middle Ages when it symbolized the sinner –a greedy, lecherous creature, driven by its senses only– to the 17th century symbol of stupidity. Hudson’s work could allude to more contemporary suggestions such as ‘a monkey on your back’ meaning that you are carrying a burden or a problem that you find difficult to get rid of. During the 1940s this was more specifically known as literally being addicted to drugs - signified by the uncontrolled grabbing and consuming driven by animal instinct and desire they represented. The posterior pose and hiding of face could suggest a literal sickness or hiding from judgement, and the skull a portentous memento mori.

‘Vale of Tears’ is a composition defying physical rationality while evoking a philosophical riddle. Human feet stand on a turtle, a hand cupping it’s knobbly shell and long hair falling at its tail. The World Turtle is a mytheme of a giant turtle or tortoise that supports the whole world, often depicted in etchings.  In his 1927 lecture ‘Why I Am Not a Christian’ Bertrand Russell explains, “If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, 'How about the tortoise?' the Indian said, 'Suppose we change the subject.’” Or as was told in other stories, the fellow answers that there were ‘turtles all the way down’, an example of infinite regress – that which arises when we ask what are the justifications for the reasons are themselves.

The final paintings in the arrangement are ‘portraits’ of unidentified people, three solo and one of a couple. All of them, again, share their space with animals – two dogs, a rabbit, and a mink. ‘Cici’ is the most modern in composure – unclothed bar a large circular brimmed hat, and a living mink around her shoulders, she poses coquettishly touching the corner of her mouth, to the left of which in solid turquoise water, is an Alfred Wallis sailing boat, transporting the painting to 1930s Cornwall. Wallis, an untaught artist, ignored perspective and based an object's scale on its relative importance in the scene, giving many of his paintings a resemblance to early maps.  ‘Duke’ shows a smiling Frans Hals style characterful, smiling woman (before him, sitters were consistently expressionless) in a ruffled pink sleeveless gaberdine, with a Papillon dog, the dwarf spaniel breed popular with high society, and often seen in portraits by Rueben’s, Watteau, and Fragonard, and perhaps the animal is the ‘Duke’ of the title, or Hudson is playing gender titling games. 

In a further evocation of the sea ‘End of Summer’ is one of two landscapes devoid of human presence, and the largest scale on view, we are slightly delivered of the anxiety of influence. Though the composition is in keeping with the historically derived offerings of the rest of the grouping, a beached whale, picnic scene and grazing deer. Water is dominant here, melding with the horizon of the sky, water has traditionally been a symbol of purification or reclaimed innocence; large bodies of water evoke voyages, transformations, and struggles with the forces of nature. Animal images were frequently used to represent the ‘other’ aspect of human personality, the unconscious, the uncontrollable, the taboo. The search for the self, allegorical as well as literal, is perhaps one of the most common themes in the present period. 

Hudson works to keep his version of pictural adoption a conspicuous element to increase and expand the system of possible connections between viewer and artwork. Presenting epithets of the history of pictorial storytelling as a publisher might nurture their ‘backlist’ titles knowing their voice or significance might rise and fall again. I can’t answer if Hudson’s approach to painting is ‘restoring [its] potential to make it see again’, but as critic Stuart Morgan stated, “artists are not in competition with each other but with themselves and with the past”.