ZOT

ZOT, means ‘fool’ or ‘crazy’ in Dutch. It was Willem de Kooning who adopted the term in several of his 1940s black-and-white paintings, where words, symbols, and biomorphic forms emerge from a field of gestural brushstrokes. Hodgson uses the term to signal a productive ‘misguidedness’ at the heart of the presented artworks.

Working fluidly across painting, sculpture, installation, drawing and photography, he navigates the different temporal signatures embedded within each medium. He further extends this lineage through drawings and collages that appropriate and subvert visual fragments from other artists. By inverting positives into negatives, collapsing figuration into abstraction and text, and allowing analogue processes to rub against digital information, he destabilises the intentions embedded in the images he borrows. For instance, in Untitled (Zot), 2024 and Untitled (Zot 3), 2025, Hodgson uses recycled lithographic plates, aluminium sheets thin enough to be shaped by hand, to create sculptural forms that recall John Chamberlain’s car-crusher-compressions while retaining a light and provisional expressionist gesture.

The artist’s studio is for Hodgson a place where past actions can be revisited, reconfigured, or undone, and where the making of an artwork is understood as a contingent event rather than a fixed point in time. A distinctive aspect of Hodgson’s practice is the construction of enclosed spaces within his permanent studio. These architectures are designed to restage or disrupt the circumstances in which certain artworks or art-historical gestures first occurred. This strategy is evident in Untitled (Post-war Painting in a Sculptor’s Studio 5), 2025, which incorporates a representation of the very site in which it was made. The work becomes both a historical re-enactment and a self-reflexive dismantling of the artist’s methodology. Hodgson calls this nested, space-within-space environment the ‘sculptor’s studio’ a physical and conceptual arena where visual languages overlap and collide in a manner reminiscent of postmodernist tactics, and where temporalities can be reordered or reimagined (think of the artistic methodologies of Kaari Upson, Rodney Graham).

Text in Hodgson’s work often appears as verb or open-ended propositions, signalling an intention while simultaneously commenting on it. In Untitled (To Empty), 2019, for instance, language becomes both instruction and dissolution, generating a layered visual field in which one image affirms or erodes the next prompting the artist to ask: ‘by dissecting the physical and conceptual actions behind artmaking, can we still authenticate and measure the value of a subjective voice?’. This tension between assertion and unravelling is more relevant than ever as it resonates with debates on Artificial Intelligence, where intentionality, authorship, and subjective voice are increasingly in question.

Registering the shift from analogue temporal and spatial relations in the post-war period to the dominant influence of digital technologies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a historiographic component in Hodgson’s work examines the instability of outcomes in a post-evidence or non–fact-based condition. The questions emerging from these works can be understood as ontological in nature. And in a moment when subjective opinion is increasingly presented as indisputable fact, these inquiries acquire particular urgency, prompting us to reconsider how – both images and identities, are formed, interpreted, and believed.

“With each ‘finished’ work, the viewer is presented with something that appears stable and familiar. And yet, the language and tropes of ‘fixedness’ have been used to deconstruct and destabilize.”  – Paul Hodgson

Reception: 4th March, 6:30 – 10:00pm