Complications

‘Complications’ is a selected group of paintings made between 2018 – 2025, including large scale new work made specifically for the project.

The new paintings extend and move forward a body of work at the core of my practice. Grouped together under the umbrella title ‘The Inbetween’, this constellation of paintings articulates an ongoing research focus on the metaphorical potentiality of supernatural horror, using genre as a gauge of the intensifying psycho-affective pressures of our era. In this series a recurring motif – a deflating balloon inscribed with a crude rendition of a face – is deployed as a substitute for the human figure / subject in conditions of mutation or collapse.

At the same time, the series aims to establish a vector between painting and literary fiction, using the depiction of interior space to invoke a structural equivalence with the haunted house novel, a form which organises its narratives around spatial elements, transitions, and connections between rooms, weaving together past and present in the process.

As it evolves, the series tests the potential for everyday materials and objects to do the work of the imaginary composite entities populating earlier cycles of imagery in my painting. This investigation has been informed by the film theorist Michael Grant’s proposition of a ‘Modern Fantastic’ (building on concepts established by Tsvetan Todorov in the 1970s), in which the logical binaries of real / imaginary or rational / irrational are superseded, with implications for the Gothic imaginary’s preoccupation with sexuality and gender.

"Each painting conjures up an alternative reality. These are evidently composed scenes, populated with familiar objects and furniture, interrupted by elements of the supernatural, science fiction, folklore, or theatre. Hulson’s process frequently begins with the making of a model or maquette. This physical act of scene-making underpins the final image, and is reiterated as he builds layered, uncanny worlds within the frame.

These worlds are ambiguous, leaving the time of day, the location or nature of the space undetermined.

Meanwhile the figures within them seem isolated, lonely or perhaps trapped. Their physicality often crushed, deflated, enclosed, or enveloped by the objects they interact with. Through these figures, Hulson probes notions of the body as a vessel - robotic or animal - versus the sentient, soulful or purposeful mankind we imagine ourselves to be.

While his paintings use the masks, sets, props and costumes of theatre, they resist linear narrative. Instead, they offer something like a reliquary for storytelling’s skeletal remains, unless the viewer chooses to make one of their own. In this way, the paintings function as devices for contemplation. Specifically, they focus in on the complexity of the question, the point where variant enigmas and obsessions converge or collide.

Themes of gender and sexual ambiguity, the otherworldly and the mundane coalesce into portraits of the ‘self as other’. His work speaks to those who harbour an irreconcilable desire to escape, whether through a screen, the pages of a novel, a fetish, a daydream, a fantasy, or an outsider ritual."

(from the catalogue introduction by Alex Zawadski)

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