GREGORY HODGE - 'Shimmer Part 1'
Sullivan + Strumpf - 27th August - 26th September 2026
Since the artist is currently unavailable for an interview, I proceed in the hope that he may reply to my email presently and at which time I shall adjust the review. Until then, my thanks to Ayas Larasati and the rest of the Sullivan + Strumpf staff for their help.
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Installation shot with the artist (photograph by Phillip Huynh)
A much-travelled, midcareer artist, who for some years now has been based in France, with a solid critical standing and patronage, both here and overseas. Hodge brings his second solo show to the gallery’s Melbourne premises as a sellout of eight large acrylic on canvas paintings. The show – Shimmer Part One – finds him consolidating his taste in rural French landscapes and architecture, evident in his 2024 work. The subjects, broadened now to include a surprising interior.
Morning Interior (2026) 130 X 97 cm acrylic/canvas
And the sense, more than ever, is of a cool revisiting of Impressionism, of comfortable rural retreat, not just in art history but to a life of discreet luxury. What holds this idyll at arm’s length is of course the artist’s distinctive treatment of combing pigment, with a peculiar, broad device in various sweeps and layers that suggest brushstrokes, yet brushstrokes that are divorced of content, of direct engagement with the motif.
The effect is very much a postmodern irony, a somewhat mechanical substitute for a brushstroke with a new attention to surface, at odds with the subject. It is a beguiling conceit, whereby the combing does not deliver either an entirely transparent subject matter, nor an entirely opaque demonstration of form. And Hodges originality rests with this teasing paradox.
Winter – Vincennes (2026) 200 X 160 cm acrylic/canvas
It is revealing that so many of the pictures flatten the picture plane, (technically, into an orthogonal projection) or resolve into a more two-dimensional composition, as in the imposing Ocean View, at 200 X 300 the show’s largest and standout work.
Ocean View (2026) 200 X 300 cm acrylic/canvas
Here the distant ocean all but dissolves at the foot of the line of trees to the foreground and this flattening makes room for the combing, which proves surprisingly faithful in rendering the broken tones of the tree trunks and subtle glow of the foliage. Impressionism survives even an impression of an impression. The curious combing can also recall the texture of tapestry or embroidery and here too a postmodern taste for the mechanical or faux mechanical imitation of tapestry exemplifies the layers of illusion at play. The work deals with detachment in a very conspicuous way and in effect distances us from the content, something at work in much of contemporary painting. One can never be far enough away from the content. A work such as From Memory deliberately places a floral textile (possibly a tapestry) to the foreground, as a means of highlighting the affinity between tapestry and treatment of the rest of the picture.
From Memory (2026) 200 X 160 cm acrylic/canvas
But whether the painting mimics tapestry or the broken brushwork of Impressionism, the crucial point remains the critical distance established by the combing. It is combing of a very singular kind. The mimicry is really a question of extent, of how much can be mimicked and in what way. It is a question of what can be alluded to and illuded to. But we stand well back to discern these. From a distance to the picture, we see the illusion; up close we see the abstract quality of various combings, the illusion of brushwork and a long tradition. On one level mimicry is intuitive, on another it is cultivated. With Hodge’s contribution we have the opportunity to stand furthest from the illusion.
While the work hedges with deeper pictorial distance, it compensates with formal distance. This emphasis upon the technique usually carries a strong decorative element and the artist’s earlier work, particularly with floral compositions, such as Flowers (2024) readily includes more abstract, ‘painterly’ passages, urging a purely decorative reading. Decoration may be defined as the ordering to a two-dimensional plane, additional schemes devising a third-dimension account for pictures.
Flowers (2024) 200 X 160 cm acrylic/canvas [NOT IN SHOW]
But there is no hard and fast line between a projection and a perspective, a pattern and a picture and Hodge’s direction has been toward more elaborate perspectives.
The artist’s development has been from vigourous abstraction, at times broaching sculpture or installation in construction to a more forthright focus on pattern and decoration. A first degree at ANU (2002-5) and a PhD in Fine Arts in 2016 to some extent steering the work, or perhaps being steered by it. Formal properties are soon relaxed to allow a modicum of depth (overlapping planes) and biomorphic shapes – a familiar path. What is less familiar is the attraction to illusion or trompe l’oeil. This is quickly exploited, not simply for their decorative value – that is quite another matter – but for the cunning mimicry afforded by deft combing. Note the fabric image to the left side of Pattern in a Landscape (2022)
Pattern in a Landscape (2022) 160 X 230 cm acrylic/canvas [NOT IN SHOW]
If flowers are easily assimilated to pattern or decoration in earlier work, the shift to landscape literally broadens horizons. While reluctant to engage with too much perspective, they reward with a greater range for combing. Courtyard (2026) is a good example of maintaining perspective while giving full rein to layers of combing. The work is larger in every sense for moving beyond the decorative, literally out of doors.
Courtyard (2026) 160 X 200 cm acrylic/canvas
Scale is a vital element in all pictures simply because the uniform combing device demands it. Shapes and tones are certainly simplified, enhancing both the tapestry-like quality and the Impressionist rendering of tone, because the combing simply needs the space to generate its illusory effect. The option of finer toothed combs does not as yet seem to have been explored. And while effective amongst flowers and landscapes alike, it is notable that figures do not figure often in the project. There is a work from 2024 Cubby, of youths in a forest, but it seems to be an exception that proves the rule. In theory, almost any photo-based source material should respond to the combing treatment, but for reasons best known to the artist* he resists them. Figures perhaps lack the solidity or passivity of buildings and landscapes.
Cubby (2024) 230 X 160 cm acrylic/canvas [NOT IN SHOW]
Yet motion is often enacted in earlier, abstract works, such as those of the Fabled Gesture show at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space in 2015, where the initial influence would seem to have been someone like Frank Stella’s bar-reliefs, with their overlapping shapes and linear borders to shapes. The artist is already attracted to the illusion of depth or volume, the subdued palette perhaps aiding the interest in volume rendered by tone. But at this point the artist is just out of art school and before embarking on a PhD, so that obvious influences are only to be expected. The doctoral studies would seem to have broadened his formal concerns, to have allowed a greater degree of figuration.
Fabled Gesture show at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space in 2015. [NOT IN SHOW]
The combination of motion with figuration is at first an uneasy one. In a later work such as Pattern in A Landscape (2022) the enacted gestures carry great dynamism, even ironically but sit uneasily with a landscape. Movement is surely the key signifier in such works, but the landscape remains strangely inert. That all changes where the artist can give his combing more to do than wriggle in imitation of brushstrokes. Then the landscapes become more than pattern, motion is diffused throughout the picture. As for figures, it may be the artist has yet to find a suitably distanced role for figures. In the meantime it is the stasis and solidity of the deserted scene that hold the artist’s interest.
Magic (2024) 200 X 160 cm acrylic/canvas [NOT IN SHOW]
While the work sits comfortably with the sprawling category of Post Modernism (as a period style) there is one feature that perhaps suggests a further category. The use of the French countryside and buildings – for an Australian artist at least – offers a displaced locality. It is not a universal reference, to say, classical Rome or modernist Paris, but something quite different. We have, I would argue, a new, generic view of the French countryside, a globalised placeholder for the frequent flyer. It is a tourist’s aesthetic. And this may be kitsch except that Hodge’s combing teases out another distance from the spectacle. The painting is about such placeholders, rather than merely participating in them and this adds a further value to the artist’s striking technique, demonstrates the formidable depth to the work.
IMAGES COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND SULLIVAN + STRUMPF
Thanks to both for help in preparing this review
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