Nicholas Hatfull. Tofu Dealer (to kill my hunger in daytime wander)

About

Hatfull is a thinker in the flaneur tradition, an urban rambler with an open, kinky, catholic eye. His paintings of modern life, via all the things that aren’t people, are both dissociative and total. Over here they are brushy and impressionistic, as if a grazed encounter or gauzy memory; over there as direct as advertising, sharp and clear for cultureless commercial sear. He makes room on a single canvas for these forms, textures and attitudes to collide. And between these elements is the residue they leave upon each other, us, and the world.

Hatfull’s new paintings reveal the artist’s most experimental inclinations, a restless reshuffling of elements (furniture foam, food containers from chain restaurants, Magnum ice creams, playground structures, etc.) through which the artist calibrates a personal offbeat, absurdist lyricism. Stains are important—they speak of forms revealing themselves and consuming themselves at the same time. Vessels are important—they hold a charge. In a series of so-called Bain-Marie sculptures exhibited
alongside the paintings, tumbles of nested fast-food hot-pot tubs romantically swirled with paint represent creation, emergence, as well as absolute gluttony and waste. It’s a turbulent business, life. The exhibition is accompanied by a 64-page zine of visual reference points and an extended artist’s text, Feast of burden, about Yasujiro Ozu, David Hammons and McDonald’s.