Marc Hulson & Alex Schady ‘SATURN’ at Transition 2, London until 5th May 2019
The gas giant Saturn is the farthest planet from Earth visible to the naked human eye, but it is only through a telescope that the planet’s rings can be seen. Saturn is comprised of both a sphere and its two dimensional counterpart the circle or disk: the object intersected and surrounded by the plane, a sculpture in relation to a painting.
The pagan deity Saturn castrated his father with a stone sickle and devoured his own children. Leader of the Titans, he presided over a pre-civilisation golden age through magical uncanny power – a monstrous proto-Freudian figure, chillingly evoked in Goya’s famous painting.
These references provide a framework for two artists to bring their practices together. Painting, represented in Hulson’s tense pictorialism, will confront sculpture, in Schady’s queer-pop bricolage: the circle slicing through the sphere. Both artists adopt a medium-specific approach but disregard any programmatic orthodoxy about those media. Put together they evoke the spirit of Saturnalia, harnessing black humour and the grotesque with playful malevolence. Sculpture will consider painting and vice versa and both will devour the other. In the infinite time of the universe, the sphere and the circle are eternally bound in the figure of Saturn.
Transition Two 110a Lauriston Road, London E9 7HA (gallery open Fri – Sun 12-6pm)
HOUSEKEEPER
Marc Hulson
Exhibition from 16 March until 25 March 2018
Opening Thursday March 15th, 6-10pm / Closing Event Sunday 25th March 3-7pm
Rendered in sombre, muted greens and yellows, Marc Hulson’s recent paintings survey an enclosed pictorial world – a socio-symbolic realm in which a succession of figures both human and non-human play out uncertain roles. In a series of sparse interiors various objects and dramatis personae occupy seemingly interchangeable positions: a knotted bundle of rags mimes or parodies a seated figure, an ancient telephone idles off the hook, oval mirrors reflect empty monochrome fields. Death’s head balloons and decapitated manikins, avatars of estrangement, haunt this dislocated backstage arena.
This interlinked group of works forms the core of his exhibition at Sagacity. Related individual paintings are also included, alongside drawings from the ongoing series ‘Cast’, a number of which were completed during a residency at Sagacity in October 2017.
Marc Hulson lives and works in London. Since 1998 his work has focused on the development of a lexicon of imagery, organised around a principal of alternation between the spectral and the visceral. Informed by a longstanding engagement with experimental, speculative and supernatural fiction, his paintings and drawings chart a specifically pictorial and personal field of the weird.
He also practices collaboratively in diverse fields (moving image, sound, installation, performance) and contributes to the programme at Five Years, a London-based artists’ association and project-space. His work has been exhibited at public, private and independent galleries in the U.K. and internationally. He is an Associate Lecturer in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.
SAGACITY Rue des Mariniers 4 / Schippersstraat 4
B- 1080 Brussels
Marc Hulson 