LONDON.- “Taken all together, Paul Hodgson’s six new pictures make a powerful address to perennial questions about the self and its ability to articulate an identity, and about faith and its reasonable limits” – Andrew Motion.

Hodgson’s new works are concerned with exploring different kinds of uncertainty as a key to pictorial narrative; ‘keys to narrative rather than narrative itself’ he says. In the catalogue text Motion identifies in the six new “heroic” works elements of doubtfulness, introspection and anguish and suggests that the power and originality of the pictures in fact derives from this intrinsic uncertainty.

Hodgson’s working methods are complex and fascinating. The process starts with photographing a model in the studio and using the images to begin a full sized painting and a series of studies. These paintings are then photographed and digitally collaged onto an image of the model and then printed onto a separate canvas. Areas of the initial full sized painting are cut and removed in order to incorporate sections of this print. Hodgson then continues to paint on the new, hybrid surface - sometimes scraping back to reveal, sometimes cutting away further sections in order to introduce more of the photographic source.

Published in association with Lintott Press, Cold Eye, is Hodgson’s response to ten poems by Dan Burt. The images deal with Burt’s themes of mortality and moral failure. The book will appear in a limited edition of 100 copies, including an original lithograph, as well as a standard edition.

The exhibition runs through April 23, 2010 at Marlborough Fine Art.