Comforter, a solo exhibition Stefan Hoza

“Poring over Judith’s skirts, there in the World's Biggest Drug Store, I knew that Botticelli — and not Botticelli alone, but many others too had looked at draperies with the same transfigured and transfiguring eyes as mine…”

-Aldous Huxley, ‘The Doors of Perception’ (1952)

Frances, fabric and cats. These are paintings of a woman and two cats—each a permutation of the same components. An anagrammatic process; same letters, new word. Judy Chicago’s ‘Kitty City’ series comes to mind, Edwin Dickinson, and Fragonard’s portrait of a woman reading. Fabric/blankets/clothing, two cats upright as Cheshire or lying prone. A blue light diffuses across the room. Green radiates through the body. We see the skeleton of the painting, a gestural bleed, next to a carved marble blanket.

Frances reads and sleeps amongst the re-positioning cats—one, a solid gray mass; the other, two glowing green eyes, swirling in space together. Disoriented after a nap, vision turned to blurred shapes. Resting and still in an unsettled present. Glowing skin reminiscent of Munch’s moonlit portraits, a graphic foot straight out of a comic strip. Spatial structures are disrupted by elongated limbs and blasts of light, signaling a constant shift in pictorial desire. Each painting mines for new connections and complicates its previous layer—postures and expressions build up around focal points and remain as a thoughtful plaque of pentimento.

Xeroxed photo collages are strung up around the shared studio. The paintings have all been worked on simultaneously, and reworked over months and months with paint and charcoal. They are part portrait and part landscape. They are a year of unemployment benefits and cohabitation and shared rent. Frances’s face illuminated by her phone, elsewhere asleep and mask-like.

- Andrew Cannon

Comforter is a selection of paintings featuring the artist's partner, Frances, and their cats. Each work contains a different formation of the three subjects, often in repose. Though the figures are relaxed in their pose, however, the paintings suggest a disquiet or looming event. The process of the painting is often visible and serves as a rupture in the pictorial space. These ruptures, along with the movement and tone of the works, allude to the disorientation of a midday nap or the impending relief of settling in for the night. The dimmed and fragmented quality in the work calls back to artists like Edwin Dickinson, whose paintings sought to capture the transience of a memory or the liminal state of his resting figures.

For more information: hello@anonymousgallery.com

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:  

Stefan Hoza .