John Hodgkinson

House of Seiko is pleased to present John in California, John Hodgkinson's debut solo exhibition with the gallery and his first presentation on the West Coast.

As a British artist working within, but not native to, California's cultural and geographic context, Hodgkinson occupies a position of both proximity and distance. The exhibition's title, John in California, underscores this condition: at once literal and estranged, it frames the work as an encounter between place and perception.

Hodgkinson's practice begins with a pragmatic relationship to subject matter, rooted in the absorption of place through its architecture. Until recently, that place has been London, where classical façades and persistent grey skies became inseparable from his identity as a British artist. In earlier bodies of work, Hodgkinson repeatedly returned to a single neoclassical building, gradually compressing its form through acts of cropping and magnification until the image dissolved into warped bands of cream-colored oil paint. A similar logic unfolds in this exhibition.

The abundant modernist architecture of Los Angeles, with its raw interplay of concrete and wood, offered Hodgkinson a distinct material and psychological entry point into California. Wood, an elemental, historically ubiquitous material, emerges as a distinctly Californian protagonist, replacing the stucco surfaces of his London works. Across the nearly forty paintings that comprise the exhibition, the viewer may encounter horizons, landscapes, eyes, or bones in each wooden bar. Yet, the works resist such associations, returning instead to a condition of essential form. The paintings are of nothing more than cropped lengths of Douglas fir. Broken down and reconstituted through painting, they become a site of potentiality rather than representation.

The individual framing of each work in buttressed aluminum further destabilizes conventional readings, minimizing the artist's hand while heightening the status of each work as an object. Installed against deeply toned brown walls, these paintings are suggested as a decorative collapse of image and environment, one more closely associated with the domestic than with a pared-back gallery space.

Hodgkinson's experience of California, particularly Los Angeles, emerges not as a narrative but as a psychological state defined by misalignment and permeability, where disparate elements are permitted to coexist without hierarchy.