Jeff Hogue, Blue Lancelot, 2009, Oils, alkyd, and varnish on canvas, 40 x 60".
Jeff Hogue, Tallgrass Afternoon, 2009, Oils, alkyd, and varnish on canvas, 54 x 72".
Jeff Hogue, Highway 60, East of 99, 2009, Oils, alkyd, and varnish on canvas, 48 x 60".
Jeff Hogue, Solitude, Oils, alkyd, and varnish on canvas, 30 x 30".
Jeff Hogue, After Gerhard, Oils, alkyd, and varnish on canvas, 30 x 30". |
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Joseph Gierek Fine Art
1512 East 15th Street
918-592-5432
Tulsa, Oklahoma
Prairie Noir,
13 Paintings by Jeff Hogue
May 28-June 27
By WILL LEATHEM
The horse, when contrasted with its rider, reminds men and women of the animal side of human beings, and of the body.
— Robert Bly, Iron John
Greeted by a message in the inbox of my preferred social network, I was pleasantly surprised to find a note from Jeff Hogue and some early treatments of the images that grew into Prairie Noir (full disclosure: I am a habitué of Jeff’s work). And who doesn’t thrill in an unauthorized peek at the index of economic indicators the day prior to its release? And so I clicked …
Primarily a treatment on modern pastoral memes, Hogue runs his subjects to earth somewhere out along the spartan Oklahoma landscape.
In Prairie Noir, Hogue continues his long-running inquisition of dissonance, interjecting texture and distortion between his subject and the viewer. For this series, Hogue steps away from his familiar palette to engage a new spectrum of tawny grass, earthen roads and vast reservoirs of aquamarine. This color shift establishes early on the underlying tension within the exhibit, and presages the key dichotomy of the collection.
Prairie Noir is punctuated by two equine pieces Blue Lancelot and Bacchus — one snow-blue almost cinematic, the other sanguine and ripe with apocalyptic fury. As I confronted the collection as a whole, I continued to stub my toe on Lancelot and Bacchus.
Most of us equate Noir with highly stylish Hollywood crime dramas — those black and white films emphasizing moral ambiguity, if not a full-frontal sexual tension. The low-key lighting, the stark contrasts, the perspective distortions of the dutch-angle, the low-angle and the wide-angle shot, these are the tools in trade of Noir. Brought to bear on the Oklahoma outstate, a darker something (not to be misdiagnosed as evil) smolders just behind the horizon. It is a Lynchian dialectic that once revealed cannot be again bottled up by canvas or the windshield of the family sedan cruising Highway 60.
The signature landscape image is Solitude. Where in ages past these plains teamed with the great herds, Hogue holds out a single, solitary buffalo beneath a stultifying vastness of time and consequence. In the central darkening of the painting, Hogue proposes hope, grazing unawares, bathed in tentative light, a teton to the species-remorse that is ours only for the asking.
Before settlement, wildfires released by lightning were the catalyst for cleansing Oklahoma prairies — a violent correction of invasive plants and insects. In Prairie Fires Hogue swells the hand of omniscience, a thunderhead, a mushroom cloud, to tower above our more ‘civilized’ notions of proscribed burning, land management and corporate farming. The light-dark composition implores the viewer to jettison convention and join in the restoration of nutrients to the exhausted soil. And yet, in the back of our mind’s eye, California blazes threatening the hives of humanity itself. In Prairie Fires, duality is laid bear: humanity’s ability to alter and destroy the macrosphere is juxtaposed with nature's own insentient capacity to do the same.
HWY 60 east of 99 invites the viewer to motion. While evoking other modern landscape painters (Ed Fischer or Rich Bowman jump to mind), Hogue achieves a palpable sense of passing through. We watch the world trundle by — almost academically — through the windshield of our auto. Cupped by a curve of road, is a darkening. It encroaches on the very epicenter of the painting. It visibly pulls against the stark sensibility of the white road signs’ exhortations to "settle down," "stop running," and "cease the travels." The viewer symbiotically becomes a traveler skirting this darkness en route to their own journey's end.
Without exhausting in detail each painting I want to quickly visit two others:
In South of Ramona verdant land upsets the balance of the other landscapes, swelling to crowd the sky. An ominous firmament lowers and grumbles grey. Inextricably linked to asphalt arteries, few locals in the continental United States are more than even a few miles from a paved turnpike. Yet Hogue refuses to shy away from the much needed confrontation — why a dirt road?
Tall Grass Afternoon is my least favorite of the collection. There is an almost studied absence of nuance, of detail. The grass stands like pentecostal arms grasping toward heaven. We are overwhelmed by the celestial sky even as the artist tempts us to to surrender to the peaceful centrality of light.
Now juxtapose this common vastness of the landscape images, the soft edges, the negative space of sky and earth against the Rosetta stone of the equine images. The equines are nearly as variant each from each as they are from the collection as a whole. They stand out as punctuation, at once disjointed and pivotal to cracking open Hogue’s meme.
The horse, while not a native of Oklahoma, remains inextricably tied to its history. In Bacchus, Hogue returns to the subject of motion expressed so blatantly in Highway 60 East of 99, or implied in South of Ramona. Only now it is animal in nature, unbridled, more than a little apocalyptic. As the name promises, there is sexual energy and rage here, strong and filled with the sap of the earth. No timid buffalo grazing unawares, Bacchus is urgent and untamed and bordering on damned. Clearly metaphorical, Bacchus dwells simultaneously in the realms of earth and purgatory.
Blue Lancelot, by contrast, is unabashed archetype — pure, white, snowy, foreleg raised in potency. The ground, snow covered. In another time, he might have been a unicorn. Blue Lancelot stamps atop a ridge, a vista from which the viewer sees in the distance below the lights of a city. Is it Tulsa or Las Angeles or Tenochtitlan? We cannot help it, it’s within our human nature to look beyond the pure and beautiful beast right before our eyes. We are drawn by elemental hungers past the purity within arm’s reach toward the surly promise of the night-occluded streets of that distant town.
It is the central challenge of Hogue’s Prairie Noir. The choosing is ours. |
