NYAB Event - Danny Hobart "If I Should Die Before I Wake"

Danny Hobart "If I Should Die Before I Wake"

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A catalogue of personal belongings, memories, and individuals, Hobart's paintings inhabit the canvas with his contemporary quotidian, while invoking the style and technique of various Old World masters. This visual tension between present and past is emblematic of a larger fascination with the divergent paths of memory and experience – the initial entrée into the ever-unfolding series of oppositions that ensue when one attempts to reunite them.

Hobart's work explores the tenacity with which we cling to material objects - the safety they provide, the meaning with which we imbue them, and the danger in equating their value with our own. His paintings are both willing and reluctant self-portraits, at once serenade and swan song to his personal miasma of desire and decay. Subversively revealing, this objectified introspection seduces the audience into the same act of self-examination, despite the inherent discomfort of peeling away the gilded veneer that coats our symbolic constructs.

It is Hobart's suggestion that, in an age where excess has ruled our sensibilities and our sense of worth, we experience an ever-present desire to hearken back to the elemental. The possessions, the people, and the recollections we horde make us complicit in their dissolution - driving us farther from the original, unadulterated form that we perpetually seek to recapture. Which begs the question: in our compulsion to accumulate, are we racing to write our own epitaph? And if we are, who do we expect to read it?

[Image: Danny Hobart "untitled (pill bottles)" (2007) oil on linen, 18 x 18 in.]