by Steve Finbow
If I am close enough to the painting of the balloons to sense the latent breath within the
inflated and feel the utter collapse of the deflated, I almost witness in it, as in myself, the
profound birth of the image of spirit made finite. As there is a reflexivity of the eye and the
mind between fullness and void, there is a reflexivity of the movements of looking and
thinking on the nature of presence and absence; they have their visual inscription, the stark
latex skin has in me its sensory echo. This new reversibility and the emergence of the flesh as
an analogue to the painted latex are the point of insertion of seeing and thinking about
inspiration and materiality in the world of appearances.
Background Noise
Marc Hulson’s most recent exhibition – Complications – at The Second Act gallery –
comprises five paintings and a pentaptych of smaller works – Background Noise – with the
presence of surrealist art such as René Magritte’s Les Menottes de Cuivre (The Copper
Handcuffs), and Wifredo Lam’s The Jungle, all of which fetishize enigma. What surrealist
painting itself, in its non-mimetic moment (the moment it ruptures representation), betrays, is
the presence of the Real. It menaces at once perception, the rational mind, and aesthetic
doctrine, as the relationship with rational vision. It is their suspension, their finitude, their
metaphysical paralysis. Cutting rational vision short, sterilizing or immobilizing creative
spirit in the repetition of the motif – in the static, shadow-play of de Chirico’s arcades or the
overwritten, hybrid syntax of Wifredo Lam’s fauna – confined in a narrow space, reserved for
the deciphering eye, it is the principle of the object’s death and of irreducible difference in the
becoming of form.
Side Effects
Side Effects – a half-deflated/inflated balloon, its inscribed minimalist face
dissolving/evolving, signifies the figurative displacement that menaces the continuity and the
life of the spirit as self-presence in the brushstroke (the inhalation of creation), it is because it
menaces materiality, that other metaphysical name of presence and of ousia (substance) in the
form of the substance (the painted object). Figurative displacement in painting breaks the
form apart. It describes relations and tensions and not appellations (names). The figure and
the sign, those unities of inspiration and concept, are effaced within pure painting. It is not a
simple analogy: painting, the image, the sensible inscription of pigment and canvas, has
always been considered by Western tradition as the inert body and matter external to the
spirit, to breath (the artist’s vital spark), to inspiration, and to the logos (rational concept).
And the problem of soul and body is no doubt derived from the problem of the painted image
from which it seems – conversely – to borrow its metaphors.
Gallery view
What is at work here is distribution – the logistics of the temporal/spatial/ocular shift
between reality and perception, the liminality of a full or necessarily delayed understanding.
In The Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière writes, “A distribution of the sensible
therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and
exclusive parts. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of
speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a
form of experience.”
Inner Circle portrays a disembodied head come to rest on a floor beside a wall. The left ear is
prominent, so is the painted mouth, but the eyes are occluded, the nose either that of a clown
or a gaping wound; a scission of the referent, a traumatic moment in the visual economy that
directly undermines the Western logocentric tradition. This image performs the very
historical violence articulated in the initial discourse: the sensible inscription of pigment and
canvas – the supposed “inert body and matter” – is here forced to usurp the place of the
animating Logos and breath. By isolating the head, the traditional seat of rational thought,
and reducing it to a passive, floor-bound object, the image declares the failure of the figure to
hold the concept stable. This dislocated form activates a form of détournement, transforming
a familiar sign into an object of primal dread. It is matter asserting its autonomy from the
spirit’s command. The contradiction between the prominent sensory organs (ear/mouth) and
the functional blindness (occluded eyes) renders the figure mute and structurally unsound,
breaking the appellation (the simple naming of a subject) and revealing the painting’s
essential operation: a destructive différance that challenges the unity of being and the stable,
self-present subject.
Complications
Rancière again, “The aesthetic regime asserts the absolute singularity of art and, at the same
time, destroys any pragmatic criterion for isolating this singularity. It simultaneously
establishes the autonomy of art and the identity of its forms with the forms that life uses to
shape itself.” In the title piece, Complications, a sexually ambiguous hooded figure, its mouth
and eyes (spectacles) drawn on the covering, mimics and subverts the classical representation
of the portrait and the sculptural bust. The figure presents a powerful simulacral inversion,
enacting a profound subversion of the classical portrait’s claims to genuine presence and is a
radical aesthetic challenge to being itself. The work performs a deliberate demotion of the
Logos and breath, replacing the expressive face – the historical anchor of the subject’s spirit –
with inert materiality. This operation is an act of existential obfuscation: it denies the viewer
access to the embodied experience, or Leib (the lived, experiential body), focusing instead on
the external facticity of the covering. By substituting authentic anatomy with a fragile sign
(the spectacle outline, the painted mouth), the work reveals that the subject’s identity, or
Dasein (Being-there), is often merely a superficial construct authored by conventional
symbols. This substitution is profoundly bathetic; the presence is simultaneously affirmed by
the figure’s recognizable form and violently destabilized by its lack of interiority. This
subversion fulfils the Rancièreian aesthetic regime by using the quotidian forms of life (plain
cloth, simple marks) to perform a destitution of the gaze, forcing a radical redistribution of
the sensible where surface arbitrariness dismantles the rational authority of the represented
subject.
Stereo
Hulson’s use of interiors is reminiscent of postmodern Edward Hopper and René Magritte
(two artists who are more similar than is first apparent and almost synchronously
contemporary), or if Vilhelm Hammershøi had started painting his domestic spaces after
spending the weekend screen-bingeing box sets of Andrei Tarkovsky films. Stereo – a
profoundly and gently unsettling image, bathed in Hulson’s trademark luminosity of
formulated greens, shows a blank oval mirror reflecting “nothing but its own being,” on the
floor beneath it, an old rotary telephone, the handset disconnected from the base with the cord
extended between them, a communicative disembodiment metaphor that reflects the unease
of the painting itself; on the sofa, a pile or twist of bindings, unravelled or about to be
ravelled.
The space becomes an existential vacuum, the composition achieves its sad, quiet power
through the deliberate absence of the human subject – the very source of the futile, restless
Will that philosophers like Schopenhauer identified as the root of human suffering. The
stillness of the scene resonates with a Ligottian pessimism, wherein the remaining artifacts
document a quiet, tragic absurdity. This flatness (as of the paint and canvas) is rooted in the
broken functionality of the objects themselves: the severed rotary telephone perfectly
illustrates Heidegger’s concept of “equipment” that has failed its task, sinking into its stark,
useless facticity. This functional breakdown pushes the viewer toward Object-Oriented
Ontology. The blank oval mirror, instead of fulfilling its purpose as a portal for self-
recognition, reflects only the banality of matter, while asserting its autonomy and its
withdrawal from human access, as articulated by Graham Harman. Stereo functions not
merely as a still life, but as a profound statement on the silent, indifferent existence of a
universe of objects that persist, detached and melancholic, long after subjective meaning has
evaporated.
The conceptual architecture of Complications establishes its authority by systematically
dissolving the mimetic ideal, forcing a pivot from the expressed spirit (inspiration) to the
latent life within matter (materiality). This violent effacement of the rational subject – seen
through figures of displacement and ambiguity – is Hulson’s mechanism for rupturing the
aesthetic frame and allowing the terrifying, indifferent Real to breach perception. It is this
breach that initiates a spiritual descent, a shift from transcendent idealism to a grounded, base
sanctity. The exhibition, in this sense, incubates a Bataillean spirituality, locating the sacred
not in the high aspiration of the soul, but in the abject and non-utilitarian presence of the
painted object. We are led, finally, to the vacant domestic interior, the ultimate crucible where
the human imaginary has been entirely evacuated, leaving behind a solemn, silent realm
where the objects assert their autonomous, melancholy existence.
Signal
The final painting in the show – Signal – surprised me. Not that it is not immediately
recognisable as a Hulson image, the setting is (un)familiar – the room, the green sofa, the
faded light, a figure that is not quite human but in that “not quite” all of what it is to be
human is both immanent and imminent. The effigy seems to be constructed of brown paper, it
relaxes, arms resting insouciantly and nonchalantly on the back of the sofa. It stares ahead,
oblivious of its non-being, its eyes, nose, and mouth cut-out voids that express nothing and
everything. When studying it, I asked Hulson how he had made it, and he replied that he had
constructed a maquette and that he still had it and may use it again. I asked if he had named it
and he said he had not. Another person in the gallery said, “He could not have named it, If he
had, he would have made it safe.” Georges Bataille writes of “the depths of existence,” and
the “depths of being” that “we could not give a name to it, it is unnameable,” and “is no less
dumb than death – it reaches the same degree of silence.”
This is true – although it has the disturbing quality of a scarecrow or a mannequin, there is
something about it that conjures up the extreme limit experience of a Hans Bellmer doll, an
appalling statement on sculptural ontology – the life of the constructed, contingent body, a
terrifying inversion of the classical sculpture, a non-subject composed of abject material
failure. Its relaxed posture is the ultimate expression of cosmic indifference: a being
comfortable in its terrifying vacuity. This paper simulacrum immediately conjures a body of
perverse geometry and psychological trauma. Like Bellmer’s work, the effigy’s essence lies
in its disassembled potential; its body is merely a maquette, a temporary arrangement of parts
ready for rearrangement or discard. The cut-out eyes, nose, and mouth are punctures –
surgical voids that articulate an extinction of inner life. They reveal the core tenet of the
philosophy of horror: that the human subject is merely a thin, fragile layer stretched over an
abyss of non-being. The crucial observation – that the artist refused to name it lest he “made
it safe” – confirms its status as an unnamed dread. Naming confers definition, boundary, and
containment; by remaining taxonomically free, the effigy asserts a pure, undifferentiated
ontological threat. It is the literal realization of the Uncanny Valley in painting: a near-human
form that exists only to expose the horror of matter asserting its autonomy. This is the
ultimate, silent sculpture: a body defined by absence, where form itself is the unbearable
proof of emptiness.
Hulson’s Complications achieves a magnificent, terrifying singularity. It is a sustained
argument for the world’s indifference, delivered through the language of the domestic and the
familiar. By meticulously erasing the expressive face and severing the communicative link,
the artist forces the viewer to confront the radical autonomy of substance. The resulting
eeriness – from the Schopenhauerian melancholy of the empty room to the Ligottian horror of
the unnamed, assembled effigy – is not merely psychological; it is ontological. The canvas,
the pigment, and the brown paper are revealed as the true subjects, enduring the collapse of
the human imaginary with cold, silent permanence. This is painting as material testimony: the
spirit has evacuated, and the objects, finally free, are simply waiting.
Marc Hulson’s future shows will include – Kristaps Ancāns & Marc Hulson – Five Years,
London 22 – 23 November 2025; Sleight of Hand – Terrace Gallery, London December 2025
- January 2026; and Kristaps Ancāns & Marc Hulson – Apiece Gallery, Vilnius, 02 February
- 21 April 2026.
Marc Hulson is a London-based visual artist working primarily in painting and drawing, long informed by experimental, speculative, and supernatural fiction. Since the late 1990s he has developed a lexicon that oscillates between the spectral and the visceral, and he collaborates across moving image, sound, installation, and performance. He contributes to the programme at Five Years (London) and lectures on the MA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. He holds an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths and a BA (Hons) in Fine Art (Painting) from North Staffordshire Polytechnic.
About the author:
Steve Finbow’s latest nonfiction – The Disorder Diaries: Neurology and the Arts – will be
published by Iff Books in 2026.
