Sachgebiete

Beschreibung:

Ca. 40 S. mit zahlr. Abb. Broschiert.

Bemerkung:

Gutes Ex. - The libidinous energy of Hodicke's paintings is extraordinary for its relaxed directness as well as its physical and emotional complexity. The immediacy of the paint stops short of becoming oppressive, for all its vivacity and drama. The images are the vectors of the paint's complexity, thickenings of the plot of its erotic flow, but they do not make the flow turgid however much they signal its stress. For all their inner complexity, Hodicke's pictures do not have the belabored, self-tortured look often associated with Expressionism, the look taken to imply distraught overresponse to reality, whether inner or outer. There is seriousness and intensity in Hodicke's responsive touch, but it does not lose its grip: there is more self-possession in Hodicke's gesture than we might think is customary for an Expressionist painting. Indeed, the images can be understood, for all their deep-rootedness in the painterliness, as an assertion of self defiant of instinct. They convey a sense of consequence beyond the primordiality of the paint. Their themes are not unrelated to Hodicke's hedonism, but they have a peculiar autonomy. If Hodicke's paintings reference the real, it is in an elusive way; if their gestures are signifiers in an experimental pictorial game concerned to allude to the unpresentable Sublime, they show that it presents itself spontaneously, with a concrete, fluid intensity. The pure painterliness needs the images, both as its visionary sublimation and to signal its intimate character. It is as if the visionary force of the images exists to clarify this intimacy-to argue that the paint is irresistible because its becoming bespeaks our most innate being, that border zone where the bodily and emotional are one.