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Following Philip K Dick's hypotheses that "... science-fiction allows a writer to transfer what usually is an internal problem into an external environment...",
I use fantasy scenarios and narratives as a means of working through relationships between figuration and abstraction in painting - a framework within which to isolate and investigate productive ambiguities in the substance and language of the medium. The work envisions humanity in isolation, inhabiting a post-apocalyptic imaginary world characterised by wilderness, physical mutation and alienated sexuality.
"In Marc Hulson's work the historical line of Romantic painting, (beginning at the end of the 18th century and continuing at the beginning of the 21st, considerably frayed) crosses a notional line (a horizontal one if you will) connecting painting, literature, photography, comic strip art, horror films and home video recordings. Marc's characters, trapped in their own melancholy world as if in amber, are not so much versions of the artist but more the subjects of his voyeuristic attention, and seem to represent shadowy corners of the imagination - here embedded in the devices of painting. If Marc's landscapes are reminiscent of illustrations to Poe's outdoor stories, they also have something to say about abstraction. If his encounters with aliens occur not as in Close Encounters but in tenement blocks and woodland bunkers, this is the fruit not only of a gothic cast of mind but also of an urbane awareness of narrative technique and of the importance of photography in contemporary culture."
David Lillington (from the introduction to the publication 'Welcome to the Secret Lands and the Secret Worlds', Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, London 2000) |
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