Neon Plasticine Paintings Are a Wild Welcome to the Jungle

The innate psychedelia of the human subconscious meets a ritualistic exploration of nature in British artist Henry Hudson's Sun City Tanning, on view at S|2, Sotheby’s contemporary art gallery. The artist’s debut exhibition in New York consists of eight enormous, hallucinatory paintings of nature that border fact and fiction through their surreal hues and overabundance of minute, dream-like detail. The striking exoticism in these landscapes feel like a child’s imagining of what a jungle may be like, if said child had extraordinary painting talent and an incredible artistic vision.

Made of plasticine, a malleable material somewhat similar to Play-Doh, the paintings have a tactility and three-dimensional quality that vastly departs from your typical flat wall work, adding a sensation of depth that tempts the viewer to enter the luscious landscape depicted. Although the use of plasticine in these paintings feels beyond appropriate, Hudson has worked with the material extensively throughout his career and it is perhaps more of a ‘signature technique’ than a specialized choice for this particular series, although the result is a harmonious synchrony either way.

Regarding his fervent affair with plasticine, Hudson believes he is simply doing what any artist must do: “I really believe that artists are curious characters, and that if something is picked up, especially in the studio, it should be pushed, studied, explored, burnt, punched, pulled apart, had the elements thrown at it, smoothed, squashed and turned on its head until you’ve both had the most passionate marriage of love and hate,” Hudson explains to The Creators Project. “I'm still married too it it's a simple as that. When I'm done I doubt I'll divorce it. I'll probably just put it in a corner to collect dust.”

Although the press release describes Hudson drawing inspiration from shamanistic rituals for this body of work, the artist himself has never had personal contact with shamans. Yet this isn’t necessarily a lack of authenticity; it’s a longstanding continuation of the myth of the artist: “I looked at Henri Rousseau’s work and became aware that he never went to the jungle, despite the myth that he had fought tigers there. Joseph Beuys never crashed his plane nor was wrapped in honey and cloth by natives (no evidence),” Hudson tells The Creators Project. “Does this change the way we look at their work? I’m interested in the myth and the experience the viewer has with or without this knowledge. Does it lessen our emotional response or heighten it?”

Sun City Tanning will be on view at S|2 until October 14th, 2016. More of Henry Hudson’s plasticine works can be found here.

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