Succubus

From a distance, with their lashings of viscous, swirling paint, Todd Hunter’s works appear to be intoxicating abstractions. Swirling, seductive forms unlatched from reality, floating in some furious erotic maelstrom.

But as one approaches these sensuous, writhing forms one may be allowed a rapid glimpse of a protruding nipple, the fine alabaster curve of a thigh, the sensual shape of a hip.  Todd Hunter tackles the female form with a strange urgency, as though attempting to tame the inherent frenzy of female sexuality. One is left wondering whether this is a single figure in a danse macabre or a grouping of Macbeth’s witches in an orgiastic rite.

That Hunter can paint is well beyond dispute. The luscious tonality of these ‘portraits’ exudes an almost supernatural, alchemical flavour. His crimsons, scarlets, pinks and oranges, placed against a plain of chiaroscuro darkness – seen in such works as Darkness at the Break of Noon – leap from the surface of the canvas, becoming three dimensional in effect, careering towards the viewer in a blur of wanton seductiveness.

Things become calmer, albeit only just, when Hunter applies his pencil work to capture the form. In one of the untitled works on paper a woman can be seen either in a gesture of modesty or in the pose of masturbatory bliss. The blur of crayon suggests that, either way, she has been caught unawares. This is a far cry from the academic nature of life drawing; the stilted poses of art school. While his gestural line-work is the stuff of a master draughtsman, his anarchic impulses bring the figure to life.

But for all of the anarchy it is clear that Hunter is a highly considered painter in the tradition of Francis Bacon, and Willem de Kooning. To successfully abstract the form one must have first mastered it. But Hunter’s clear mastery of line is balanced against a willful urgency; he wrestles with these succubi, these visitations of lust. In his drawings the figures dance, preen and pirouette. In his paintings they go further.

“In medieval legend a succubus is a demon who takes the form of a female to seduce men (especially monks ) in their dreams. They draw energy from their prey to sustain themselves, often until the point of exhaustion or death of the victim. The plural succubi comes from the Latin succuba; ‘prostitute’.  According to the Malleus Maleficarum, or Witches’ Hammer, succubi would collect semen from the men they seduced, which incubi would then use to impregnate women. Children so begotten were supposed to be more susceptible to the influence of demons.”*

In the 16th century the carving of a succubus on the outside of an inn indicated that the establishment also operated as a brothel. But Hunter’s studio is far from being a ribald environ of nude nymphets, indeed, surprisingly Hunter even eschews a life model, although he has in the past, opted to delve into the explicit pornography of such ‘gentlemen’s titles’ as Swank and Ribald.

Like most hard-core pornography these are soulless images and rarely erotic in the true sense of the term, but they made for fine fodder as the starting point for a painting; unlikely and often grotesque forms creating the beast with two backs.

The use of photography as a basis for painting has a solid history by now and an interesting precursor to Hunter’s approach would be the equally painterly Francis Bacon who considered photographs as source material as essentially ‘found objects’. But Bacon established a fascinating relationship with the photographer John Deakin and used his soft-core erotic imagery as a springboard for extraordinary grotesqueries of the female form. When Bacon used Deakin’s gently reclining nude image of Henrietta Moraes she was depicted grossly sprawled with a syringe in her arm (Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe, 1963).

In many respects Hunter seems to be on an opposite tangent. Where Bacon clearly deplored the female form, Hunter obviously cherishes it. He has taken the manipulated models of pornography and breathes new life into them, freeing his women from the pages with dervish ferocity. In such small paintings as Just Like the Night miniatures, two figures ride each other in organic frenzy, eroticism unleashed in a tempest of pinks and reds, a night of rutting excess as the tincture of blue in the far right gives hint of dawn.

The extraordinary colouration seen in these paintings has another source as well. In 2001 Hunter went on an artists trip through Central Australia. For a month-and-a-half Hunter slept outdoors, experiencing the deafening silence of the Tanami Desert, the mysteries of Uluru, the primordial haven of King’s Canyon and the Aboriginal settlement of Warnum (Turkey Creek). He sat with the renowned artists Rusty Peters, Paddy Bedford and Freddie Timms and watched them work their magic. The blazing desert skies, the red of the sand, the majestic, incomparable sunsets and the work of the renowned Jirrawun artists all impacted dramatically on his palette.

The discovery of the genre of still-life painting in the Netherlands during the 17th Century had already impacted on Hunter during his formal studies in providing a basis for considering the format, composition and modes of representation of constructed space. The impact of the formal Dutch approach can be seen to this day in the tonal depth and elaborate use of glaze in Hunter’s paintings, but unlike the formality of such artists, Hunter is not afraid to lash out with a squeegee and layer his paint, sanding it back to find the right finish and building it up again. The sheer physicality of these works suggests a manic bid to eek out an element of purity from the chaos, to find the form within the abstract – as he has said of his work, to make “a gesture that I believe to be a real representation of the figure.”

– Ashley Crawford

* Definition from Wikipedia