Atrata is pleased to announce Pink Shadow, Dustin Hodges’ first solo exhibition in France. The presentation will unfold over the gallery’s different venues, the Villa Atrata in La-Roche-Posay, the medieval St. Croix chapel in Angles-sur-l’Anglin and Atrata Paris.

Hodges’ paintings abandon their status as single images to engage in the extended temporality of film. Charged with a strong sense of expectation, they borrow the tension between the animate and the inanimate already present in cartoons. Hodges remembers noticing as a child how one object or shape from a scene
could be detached and rendered in a condensed way, abstracting itself from the context it was part of. For instance, reproducing the pile of rocks from which moths emerge and fly on the Butterflies (1910) by Odilon Redon, Hodges became interested in animating what appeared as an ambiguous and almost autonomous shape, turning it into a generative system capable of exploring transformation, either inside or outside the frame.

Several characters from the animated cartoon “Arthur”, but also coquettish off-brand cartoon lions and even Disney’s recently censored crows inhabit some of the paintings. Rather than fixating on their stories, psychology or even mediatic reach, these images are an excuse to reveal how painting can obliterate, reveal or produce new narratives, turning these references into distant and mediated sources. Certain movements or events, such as forms falling or diving, gazes meeting and heads twisting, point to invisible vectors that crisscross the work, ultimately leaving the fate of these elements unresolved.

In the high-ceilinged nave of the chapel, Hodges presents a group of seven works in contrasting color registers. If canvases can be taken as a film, a porous membrane that modulates light, pigments can go from full saturation, bright and vibrant on the surface, to the washed out and incomplete. Color can merge into the texture of the linen, becoming a part of its materiality, or be applied as a very last layer, adding an intense magenta or orange glaze on white in a process similar to film colorization. Technique is not a skill or a fetish but rather a device, a means to communicate the liminal moment in which images appear, change or fade.

“There’s no such thing as a pink shadow” says Amy Sillman in a conversation with the artist. But it is precisely when shadows, halos or awkward shades in what looks like “bad” animation seem disconnected that they can reveal how illusion in moving images is built. And if canvases can be taken as a film, they can also present themselves in different rhythmic projections that defy linearity, like in the chapel display. Painted backgrounds emulating anaglyph filters or burnt celluloid, sprocket holes and flicker illusions reveal that the film is a construct as much as the painting. Hodges’ work plays with the legend or the dream of the self-reflexive artistic medium and turns to fiction as a way to process painting’s impossible specificity.

Dustin Hodges (b. 1984) lives and works in New Mexico, United States. He completed a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University in 2006, and went on to study at Städelschule, Hochschule für Bildende Künste, from 2006–2007. In 2012 Hodges received his MFA from Bard College. Recent solo exhibitions include Francine at 15 Orient, New York, (2021); Establishing Shot at Soft Opening, London, (2019); Soothing Tranquil Energy at Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles, (2018); Late Stick Style at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, (2014)