Review: 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 what he ultimately can’t in an intangible surrealist nightmare, plagued in existential strife. Who is this man? What is he looking for? More importantly, is there anything to find?

It’s not a sense of purpose Hocks is attempting to portray in his works, but the search for the 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 is not so obscure that it is difficult to comprehend. Presented in an ironic eloquence with a type of “ah-ha” moment, like when discovering the answer to a riddle, the deeper connotations become clear: this is an individual baffled by indecision and confusion.

 

Untitled (man with hats) 2006, oil on toned gelatin silver print

That is what is so fascinating about Hocks. He is almost religiously prophetic in how he expresses lofty truths, but in such simple execution. Like 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 as clear and concise as it can be, there is nonetheless a world of religious meaning lurking within the subtext. Hocks is a prophet, but instead of prophesizing the coming of God or to love one’s neighbors, he predicts a fundamental inadequacy of one’s place in the world---a place one might even want to escape.

Once again situated in an open field, a sheet tied in knots hangs from the sky reaching to the ground. In this scene, the man is absent. Like a child trying to sneak out of their house by tying bed sheets into a makeshift rope to shimmy down though a window, the nameless man does too. However, instead of escaping from a house, the man is escaping from the clutches of an anonymous world “up there somewhere” that is not of our own. Hocks doesn’t want to be in an 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 the reality. It is an existential choice: reality or delusion.

 

 Untitled (rope of sheets) 1999, oil on silver print

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 form it takes, is inherently philosophical. How can one set out to create something with artistic purpose without teetering on the edge of both, metaphorically speaking, question and answer? For the aritst, the question is the will to create. The answer is the creation. The whole process is philosophy itself, for philosophy is by definition a question of truth, and Hocks is just that: a seeker of truth, albeit in the sphere of artistic, personal expression.

Both philosopher and artist must rely on themselves for objective and subjective truth, even if vicariously through 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 of the neccesities of survival, acts as a cleverly executed, surrealist metaphor for self-reliance. Primordial sustenance in the very core of someone is the responsibility of the that individual alone. What other sustenance does the individual have but his own creations, no matter how insignificant? In other words, Hocks warms himself by the fire of his own creative expression, utterly alone in the lifeless, empty room of that which is his existence.

 

Untitled (man at fire) 1990, oil on toned gelatin silver print

One of the most difficult things to do is to express something truly meaningful in a simple way. In literature, it is a far greater task to write a purposeful three-line haiku than a free-verse prose poem where the pages can be endless. 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 there lies a whole new dimension of both implied and inherent innuendo. With Hocks, and I think with almost any art form, nothing is as it seems. As artists and patrons, we can not escape the vacuum which is the symbolic and metaphorical representational forms ever present all around us, not just in art and pretty things, but in our whole lives.