On July 23, ANDREW RAFACZ Gallery in Chicago is set to present Dreams Burn Down, a solo exhibition of paintings, works on paper and sculpture by uber-talented a multi-Juxtapoz collaborator, Cody Hudson.
For the past year, Cody Hudson has taken his elemental compositions, typically applied to birch panels, and translated them to stretched linen, augmenting their painterliness and deepening their relationship to a painting tradition. He has also redefined his large, colorful shapes to imply a more immediate relationship to the natural world. While remaining stylized and abstracted, his newest works are also indebted to portraiture and landscape painting, at times suggesting masks, sunrises, and still lifes. A new series of works on paper articulates a close up desert landscape of psychoactive cacti. The resultant imagery is bold and graphic, while retaining the artist’s hand and brushwork.
The artist also presents a series of freestanding, wall leaning, and tabletop sculptures in both steel and Baltic birch plywood. These works are largely figural, and their constructions line up directly with their companion shapes in Hudson’s paintings. With holes punched out to intimate a figure’s gaze, they are experienced anthropomorphically, giving the gallery space a living energy. Referencing the brutal figuration of Dubuffet and Picasso, they are also linked to the large-scale sculpture of Hudson’s contemporaries such as Aaron Curry and Thomas Houseago.
