Notes

Authenticated on the reverse by J H Neethling 25/08/2012.

Based on the overweight regent presented in Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi (1896), Ubu is a recurring figure throughout Robert Hodgins’s oeuvre from the 1980s and 1990s. Jarry’s Ubu is a cauldron of human follies, especially those associated with power. In equal parts crackpot emblem of the aristocracy and cartoon capitalist, Hodgins successfully transposed this vulgar European figure to late-apartheid South Africa. While not as corpulent as the archetypal Ubu, the sober-suited personage in this composition embodies Ubu’s virtues of menace and ostentation. As in every Hodgins painting, this work stages an argument between icon and matter. The fleshy pink, while descriptive of race, also acknowledges the simplified figuration and vital colouration of Philip Guston, whom Hodgins esteemed. The composition is neatly intersected, the right half painted a menacing wine-red. The two geometric forms in this interior room, if indeed it is a room, suggest paintings. Is this Ubu an art collector?

Sean O’Toole