oohart艺术

For his recent series, The Life We Left Behind, Hod upends Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray by means of mirrored abstractions that begin with heavily labored gradient under paintings invoking the sublime sunsets of J.M.W. Turner which the artist cancels with a chroming technique first developed by the US Navy in 1939. He then degrades this finish fetish application via air pressure, water, ammonia and various acids to create a surface tension between newfangled industrial applications and age-old oil technique. It’s a series of vertical landscapes that map the rifts between vanity and venality as much as they mimic the patina of our decaying infrastructure (bridges, tunnels, waterways) that once supported life but now serve as ruins for modern-day ghost towns. Hod implicates the viewer as an agent in these lustrous action paintings, an abstract figure reflecting metaphors on their own conspicuous relationships with luxury and nature within the formal boundaries of their own distorted representation. In the age of Instagram, Hod’s chromed canvases shine a light on the true, unfiltered image of a generation who has staged so many self-portraits it can literally no longer recognize itself.