John Hodgkinson

Five paintings of quoins.

Hodgkinson’s previous paintings, shown last fall at Ramiken’s group show in London, depicted cream, beige, and gray slivers of Georgian buildings, shining against textured patchworks of peripheral darkness, as if one was peering out from the windows of an unlit building at night - a stalker’s vision of neoclassicism. This new body of work focuses exclusively on the corners of those buildings.

There is no redemption for the beauty of these schizophrenic paintings, which operate out of pure pathology. The dementia-nality tightens the points into slices of deranged neoclassicism, hanging like architectural trophies amidst contemporary vulgarity. The paintings put the buildings on the couch, a setpiece of forensic psychoanalysis with a diagnosis of bad teeth minimalism, stained and crooked and as warmly familiar as any English translation could ever hope to be. If we’re talking about teeth, the fetish is for Judd teeth, those straight up and down big white perfect smiles that make it so easy to spot Americans abroad. In thickly spread, confectionary oil, Hodgkinson conjures the neoclassical stucco disguise as pure pleasure sugar rot, turning the wheel hard between shadow and color, austere and ironic, concrete and abstract, correct and incorrect, passive and aggressive, vertical and horizontal, certain and uncertain. The echo of the monochrome seductively shimmers in the background of the repetition, as if any of these works could resolve into soothing blankness.

This is Hodgkinson’s first solo show with the gallery - the “putting on the braces” moment.

John Hodgkinson was born in Lincoln, England in 1989. He lives and works in London, England.