The Surrealist Artwork Of Teun Hocks »

When I see an artwork by Teun Hocks, I think of crisis. I see within the borders of the frame a nameless recurring man, hopeless, as he attempts to grasp something just out of reach. He is in an intangible surrealist nightmare, plagued by existential strife. Who is this man? What is he looking for? More importantly, is there really anything to find?

It’s not a sense of purpose Hocks is attempting to portray in his works, but the search for purpose itself. The search is absurd, irrational, and void of reason.

A man in an open landscape stands bewildered as a flock of fedora hats float above him. The man holds his head in a gesture that implies “What now?” It is obvious that one of the hats is his, but which one, and even if he were to find it, would he be able to catch it before the wind takes it to some unseen distance? The metaphor isn’t difficult to comprehend. Presented in ironic eloquence, like when discovering the answer to a riddle, the deeper connotations become clear: there is an individual baffled in indecision and confusion.

What is so fascinating about Hocks is that he is almost religiously prophetic in how he expresses lofty truths in such simple execution. Just as the statement “Give a man a fish and feed him for a day, but teach a man to fish and feed him for life” is clear and concise there is nonetheless a world of religious meaning lurking within its roots. Hocks is a prophet; he predicts a feeling of fundamental inadequacy of one’s place in the world, a place one might even want to escape.

Situated in an open field, a sheet tied in knots hangs from the sky and reaches to the ground. In this scene, the man is absent. Like a little child trying to sneak out of his house by tying their bed sheets together in a makeshift rope to shimmy through a window, the nameless man has done the same. However, instead of escaping from a house, the man is escaping from the clutches of an anonymous world above that is not unlike our own. Hocks doesn’t want to portray some external heaven or place that is not bound in this world. He wants to be here and now, in the open fields of a place that, however malignant, is still reality. It’s an existential choice: reality and all it encompasses or a place that may be an illusion.

Philosophical creativity

It would be a stretch of the imagination to assume that Hocks is attempting to make a religious statement rather than a philosophical one. All art, no matter what moniker it takes, is inherently philosophical. How can one willfully create something with artistic purpose without teetering on the edge of both question and answer? For the artist, the question encompasses the will to create. The answer is found in the creation itself.  The whole process is one of philosophy, as philosophy is inherently a question of truth. Hocks is just that: a seeker of truth, albeit in the sphere of personal expression.

Both philosopher and artist must rely on themselves to find objective truth in the works they create. In Untitled (man on fire), the same anonymous man sits in an almost empty room warming his hands to a fire painted on a canvas. Fire, the most primitive and basic survival necessity, acts as a cleverly executed surrealist metaphor of self-reliance. Primordial sustenance is the responsibility of the individual alone, and what other internal sustenance does the individual have but his own creations, no matter how meagre? In other words, Hocks warms himself by the fire of his own expression, utterly alone in the lifeless, empty room of his existence.

One of the most difficult things to do is to express something meaningful in a truly simple way. In literature, it is a far greater task to write a purposeful three-line haiku than a free-verse prose poem with endless numbers of pages. The same rule applies to painting. An image of a man sitting in an empty room or a bed sheet hanging from the sky is clear enough on its own, but under the surface lays a whole new dimension of both implied and inherent innuendo. With Hocks, and I think almost any art form, nothing is as it seems. As artists and patrons, we can not escape the vacuum of symbolic, metaphorical, and representational forms present around us, artistically and otherwise.

Rating: 5/5