TODD HUNTER ZEN ARCADE

Whatever an artist’s personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Willem de Kooning

Looking at the bustling, electric gesture of Todd Hunter, feeling the way that the colours collude with this buoyancy, it is not hard to understand the deep affection he has for de Kooning. 

The drawing that was so foundational for de Kooning, both as procedure, but also as a way of splicing thinking and feeling, allowing space for intuition, is also crucial in the daily practice of Todd Hunter. Drawing is where the day begins, and from time-to-time it bookends it. This quieter, more meditative conduct has become part of a regime that sees painting resting on the DNA of those drawings, if not structurally, then certainly psychologically.

The women that burst through de Kooning’s expressionist labyrinth also lurk in the fabric of Hunter’s paintings though they are only hinted at, insinuated by the sweep of a thigh, the curve of a buttock or breast – much as they do in Cecily Brown’s paintings, occasional limbs in a swirling, troubled landscape – a raw up-dating of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.

In these newest paintings of Todd Hunter there is increasingly evidence of drawing, more the way that the brushstroke is charged with a soulful, expressive imperative rather than a structural skeleton.

Todd Hunter is a painter of rare tenacity. He paints big and he paints with considerable conviction and risk. I think about Hunter’s reverence for de Kooning in the same way that Nick Cave held the deepest admiration for Leonard Cohen as the greatest songwriter of all. For Nick Cave, Leonard Coen opened the door to the richness and risk of confession. There is a transaction between de Kooning and the generation of painters like Cecily Brown and Todd Hunter where the best actions become historical and rest meaningfully upon other artists.