Strauss & co - 2014 Review

Proud Professor signed twice, dated 1996 oil on canvas 121,5 by 91cm Sold R886 704, 10 November 2014 The Golden Wall is, to the best of my knowledge, a one-off, an unrepeatable and unrepeated gesture. Whether it is or not, it remains an extraordinary evocation, even unashamed celebration – though with the presence of a museum piece – of the sheer painterly ebullience of which Hodgins was capable. Altogether darker, more oppressive and more complex is another work that went under the hammer in the course of 2014 – Don Giovanni in Hell , dated to 1999/2000 and realising R738 920 in the June auction. While giving the appearance, perhaps, of some of the qualities I have discussed in relation to Hodgins’ self-described “little paintings”, Don Giovanni is in fact the kind of work on which Hodgins could labour passionately for months, even years on end. Characteristically, he started by “pushing paint around” on the tabula rasa of a new canvas – an idiosyncratic process geared ultimately to a mining of the unconscious, that could stretch out for months as he gradually used the effects of chance, a near automatism and sometimes sheer Artist’s Models signed, dated 1991/2 oil on board 62 by 76,5cm Sold R409 248, 30 June 2014 boredom to empty out the contents of his reason and attain to a state of painterly grace. Then once some suggestion had taken hold, he would begin adding and subtracting brush marks and line, building abstract plays of paint in search of the vision taking holistic shape in the process of artmaking, changing the background from red to white, then dappled in between, weighting then second-guessing masses like the fur of Don Giovanni’s cape to register echoes of turmoil…Then one day, always mysteriously the angels and demons would recede and in the painted residue of the process, it would all, manifestly, have fallen into place. The work was done. The result here – and the particular work is replete with the process I alluded to above – is a memorable image: Don Giovanni , already red-skinned like a demon of the underworld ahead of his descent by contract into a hell that is both disinfected and like a public bath, casting a deep-browed glance behind him, certainly doomed but not entirely wistful, while the dark passions that animate him are given operatic play in abstract passages of paint. 58