Notes

Familiar icons of malevolent characters typically inhabit Hodgins’s paintings and are both tempered and aggravated by his mastery of colour and texture. In this instance, he starkly casts the televangelists and self-styled redeemers Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker as the ungodly, the fallen from grace. He clads the outrageously extravagant and dissolute duo in shocking pinks which he then dramatically offsets against the deep teal green table. Their ‘halos’ are the mordant boxed in and stencilled words ‘God is Love’ and ‘HE will provide’, the latter jutting out of the frame.

‘Robert Hodgins knows that image and text function powerfully as mutually invested entities … Hodgins inhabits and deploys language with an almost tactile delight.’¹

1. Brenda Atkinson. (2002) New Loves, Old Affairs: An introduction to the work of Robert Hodgins, in Robert Hodgins, Cape Town: Tafelberg. Page 14

Exhibited

Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, Robert Hodgins: Looking Back, 13 April – 11 May 2013.