Joshua Hogan: Shadow and Shine

The artists who have most influenced Joshua Hogan are ones who, as he says, “express the feeling of something, more than just paint on a surface.” These artists – Turner, Gorky, and Monet – have a soft presence in his paintings. In spite of these recognizable influences, Hogan’s aesthetic slips away from any single stylistic bracket. His paintings have relics from various movements – but, his reality is most akin to the Surrealists. Hogan’s shapes are a complex web of random exchanges that lie in the unconscious and its disruptive disconnection of signified relations. Hogan places the shapes he has gathered from around the world and creates a metaphor for the way that all things are related. His paintings invoke concealed connections; they tie together things that are unlikely and distant. As if you are flying over the 3rd story, or the rooftop, or higher, Hogan’s paintings show a vantage point where, when you look down, everything is rendered into incredible abstraction and we are all the delicate shapes that float together on an earthen background.