© the artist, courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York

Trenton Doyle Hancock, "Meddler" (2008). Mixed media on paper, 23 x 19 1/2 in.

March 2009 Reviews

The Double Club

Prospect.1, theanyspacewhatever, The Art of Participation

The Order of Things

Keltie Ferris

Nayland Blake

Mika Tajima

Anne Truitt

Hans-Peter Feldmann

Phillip Allen

Native Land, Stop Eject

Katja Strunz

Trenton Doyle Hancock Blue Chips and Bargain Hunters in Bologna Diana Al-Hadid in New York Gary Panter in New York Portrait of the Artist as a Facebook Profile

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In Trenton Doyle Hancock’s mythopoeic universe, creatures called Mounds and Vegans engage in unending warfare. Mounds are soft and colorful; Vegans are stark and live in a realm of black-and-white. Contrary to what the name usually connotes, Vegans are the aggressors in this world, in which the two groups serve as allegorical stand-ins for contrasting artistic styles, cartoon superheroes, and religious factions battling at the edge of the apocalypse.

Hancock has spun this unresolved epic struggle into a variety of forms, including mixed-media works that appear in galleries and museums, a comic book detailing various imaginary characters, and the set and costume design for a contemporary ballet. A similar range was on display at James Cohan Gallery. Throughout a grid of eight paintings, each about five foot square, the top half of a rounded head (a Baby, in Hancock’s cosmology) was serially repeated with different motifs, colors, and text, including blank and bloodshot eyes, deep blues and blacks, and words with visual as much as semantic associations. Black raindrops painted on the wall behind the work contained individual letters spelling out the exhibition’s title, fear. Other rooms presented Vegans, Mounds, and aspects of their unfolding narrative situated within smaller collage-based works and a portfolio of prints.

Hancock’s proliferation of stories, media, and hybrid creatures rarely feels redundant or cluttered. Ultimately, he’s more of a draftsperson, collagist, and comic book artist writ large than a painter, even though vivid swaths and sprays of color are central to his work. He frequently draws directly on canvas. One of the three biggest pieces in the show, Descension and Dissension (2008), beautifully combines Hancock’s themes and artistic techniques. It features a skeletal figure doused with a bucket of pink blood against a prismatic background of primary colors while a bony gray Vegan arm stretched across the bottom of the canvas futilely attempts to grab some of this visual magic. Hancock’s latest installment of his unique world translates fantasies of escape and empowerment into something both eerie and freeing.

"Trenton Doyle Hancock" originally appeared in the March 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' March 2009 Table of Contents.