A poem by the late poet laureate Mark Strand is tacked up on Colin Hunt’s studio wall.
Keeping Things Whole
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
Strand has gone on from the place where he had been, imagining the air rushing in to fill the void. Hunt paints the void with vestiges of the people who once occupied it and have forever changed it. Their presence remains. “I’m attempting to upend conventions of landscape painting and the sublime to focus on everyday mysteries about death,” he says, “how we live with it and how the enormity of someone’s life can coexist with the hole of their nonbeing.”
Many Worlds Interpretation (H.C.H.C.), egg tempera on hardboard panel, 81 x 41"
His latest series of egg tempera landscapes, Remains, will be shown at Hirschl & Adler Modern in New York, March 18 through April 16.
Hunt talks with his sitters about their relationship to a favorite landscape, and what kind of landscape they imagine themselves to be before they go out for a photo shoot. “I photograph them within the space that’s an external vision of themselves,” he explains. “I’m like a satellite orbiting around them, photographing from different angles, into the light and away from the light. In the studio, I construct their image with the different views, filling the aperture, the vacuum, of the space where they were.
Many Worlds Interpretation (C.D.H.S.), egg tempera on hardboard panel, 81 x 41"
“The paintings are about the shared human experience of grief—the idea of loss, how we inhabit spaces, how we change them,” he adds.
Talking about the remaining presence of a person, he refers to the Many Worlds Interpretation in quantum physics, which implies that there are an infinite number of parallel universes.
Many Worlds Interpretation (H.C.H.T.L.a), watercolor on paper, 30¼ x 15½". Photos courtesy the artist and Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York. © Colin Hunt.
He and his wife, Heather, had a daughter, Willa, who was born with special needs. “She lived an alternate reality, but was still a presence,” he explains. Willa died when she was 2½ years old and her parents explore the reality that she still remains in the place where she was. “We carry someone with us and they can come back to us,” he says. “Is it now and the future connecting to a set of moments? Or is it all just one?” —
Hirschl & Adler Modern
The Fuller Building • 41 E. 57th Street • New York, NY 10022
(212) 535-8810 • www.hirschlandadler.com
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