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Exhibition by Chris Hunt
'Once when [Tanizaki] was criticized for not exploring the inner life of one of his characters, he retorted: "But why should I discuss his psychology? Can’t the reader guess from what I’ve already told him?"'
- Edward Seidensticker, Introduction to ‘Some Prefer Nettles’ by Tanizaki 'He is the mask without the face'
- Henry James on Walter Pater The artist Chris Hunt is a painter who lives and works in Canterbury. He has recently worked on large-scale mural commissions for the University of Kent, and teaches part-time at Ashford School of Art and Design and the University of Kent. The artist writes A portrait can reveal the numerous dimensions and contradictions in a face - but are they those of the sitter, or of the painter? The portrayed face may be likened to a mask, which yet reveals other true contents - a mask that is fashioned by its maker to conceal and protect an identity by respecting its mystery, but which, perhaps inadvertently, portrays and reveals something else. The painting itself is this other kind of portrait. Impulses, decisions, revisions – the multiple movements of the brush in figuring the stasis of the sitter reveal the feelings of painting – through its mistakes, growth, uncertainties and insufficiencies – the eye searches for what a painting lacks and is wanting, the unresolved that is worth seeing. In this a painting shows that the body will have its say. I believe painting to be the eloquent voice of the silent body, in that its rhythms, spaces, colours and forms are felt as much as they are seen. The human subject is always present in this sense, even in the absence or dissolution of its image. In themselves, paintings of people offer possibilities for empathy and psychological insight – something beyond the mask of the social self. I hope that in this, there are opportunities for a degree of self-discovery.
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