Evan Hockett's Untitled, From 2% Series

Evan’s figural, portrait style painting, Untitled, from the Series 2%, is part of a suite that explores, appropriates and subverts components of traditional Western symbolic modes and thereby attempts to invent a new system. This particular painting adopts (Christian) visual tropes, but adapts them in a number of unfamiliar ways, therefore the specific, suggested content of the symbolism remains opaque and the “traditional” (read: familiar) mode of symbolism becomes alienating and unfamiliar. This works in tandem with the contrast arising between the flatness of the halo and superimposed text, versus the exaggerated (rendered) physical volume of the figure’s body.

Untitled is an oil and ink painting on a rigid support, sized 18”X 24”. The portrait is slightly larger than life size, and frames the figure’s head and shoulders, which are unclothed. The color palette is very neutral (almost black and white), slight greenish tinge of the figure’s skin and the vividly red blood smeared on its face. The form is depicted with an almost exaggerated sense of volume; the musculature, for example, is carefully and meticulously rendered with value gradations that result in an almost sculptural, superhuman form. In contrast, the figure bears a halo that is derived from a somewhat iconographic, “Byzantine” (orthodox) visual tradition. It is a simple thin, black circle, and comes out of a mode of figuration that is definitively flat and two-dimensional. Further, the text (in an unknown [invented] alphabet), which frames the figure, suggests the mysterious person’s importance, but the mystery of its precise meaning maintains a distance the suggested symbolic content. The figure gazes upward with milky eyes, and which furthers his almost statuesque appearance. His face is smeared with blood, and his shoulders and chest bear tattoos of ambiguous significance. The background is fairly simple, and along with the value gradation in the figure, suggest an elevated light source toward which the subject looks.

The exaggerated volume of the figure results in an overall image that is not “photo-real”, but is nonetheless unmistakable and representational. The depth and volume of the human form contrasts with the flatness of the halo and superimposed text, which suggests that the “physicality” of the figure is real, or natural, and the meaning projected onto the figure is flat, or general. A secondary use of “signifying” marks and text comes from the figure’s tattoos, which ultimately indicate the dimensionality of the form, and unite the flatness of text with the dimensional, physical quality of the figure.

There are a number of striking formal and conceptual issues going on in this painting, and because the conceptual issues are themselves rooted in the use of visual/formal elements, the weightedness of the particular tropes (like the blood, which seems to connote a martyrdom, the halo, the text) is cohesive, and clearly inspired by an existent tradition, but is a new and different appropriation of the traditional elements. Therefore, the painting is familiar, but also somewhat alien.

Although the unorthodox use of some familiar symbolic tropes alters their meaning (specifically, it makes the specific suggested meaning opaque and mysterious), the Christian imagery is immediately palpable, and nearly overwhelms the piece, or suggests (at first glance) that the content is somehow related to a Christian ideology. The mysterious content is helped by the figure’s nondescriptness (it does not read as a Christ-like figure) in counteracting the strong allusion to an explicitly Christian content. Still, the notion of martyrdom is clearly conveyed, and it would be reasonable to think of the figure as some kind of saint (within a Christian tradition). The viewer is still, however, struck by the feeling of some familiarity (with the visual trope), with the undeniable mystery of the figure itself.