Notes

‘It was through art museums, theatres, music and literature that the young Robert Hodgins found his escape from the London of the Depression- era of the 1930s, an escape that no doubt still informs his conception of art and his understanding of its possibilities. In his work, art-historical references are woven into and disrupted by the brutal forms of comic-book pop culture; famous lines and quotations from Shakespeare, Goethe and [Alfred] Jarry are spiced with the colloquial outbursts of scoundrels and poker players. But most importantly, Robert Hodgins is a painter in an age of mechanical reproduction. In his hands, the paint is made flesh, the forms visceral and haunting, the desire, fluid. Pain sits on the edge of her seat. A vast library of cultural knowledge and points of reference is filtered through lived experience and deposited onto white canvas, a battleground of countless possibilities but only one solution. The end is never the destination – as colours shift and are overpainted, forms are left unfinished as ideas are slowly given expression. Failure is always an option for such is the nature of the subject, of the human condition. The history of Western art is the foundation upon which Robert Hodgins built his painter’s castle. Using the stability that these forms and influences provide, he then strips them bare and opens them out to assimilate less-noble forms like cartoons, graffiti, comic books, bathroom humour, tragi-comedy, soap operas, and, of course, rampant play. Unlike Bacon towards the end of his life, Hodgins does not fall into the trap of contrivance – rather, he conjures the image not from convention but from his memory as they are processed through the subconscious. No form or subject matter escapes his curiosity or exploration. Robert Hodgins is an artist’s artist and a painter’s painter. There can be no doubt, at least in my mind, that Hodgins is the greatest painter in the history of South African art. His work is not for the faint-hearted for he is certainly an acquired taste, reserved for the few who try to penetrate the surface, who have an innate urge to scratch beneath convention and open their imaginations to the demons of viscerality.’ – Kendell Geers

Kendell Geers (2002) Undiscovered at 82. In: Brenda
Atkinson (ed) (2002) Robert Hodgins. Cape Town:
Tafelberg Publishers, pages 65, and 68 - 69.

Provenance

Estate Late Robert Hodgins