Incubus 1991

Gary Hume made this picture, Incubus, with gloss paint on aluminum, and the flatness makes me think about process, about how it’s made and what it is. Hume often uses commercial gloss paint, which is fascinating because it’s so slick and everyday, but in his hands, it becomes something else entirely. The surface is super smooth, almost like a mirror, but not quite. You can see how the color has been applied in blocks, and the way the light bounces off it changes how you read the shapes. If you look closely, you can see subtle variations in the pink, almost like ghostly rectangles hovering beneath the surface. It’s pretty cool how he uses color and form to create this sense of depth and ambiguity, right? Hume’s work has this strange way of being both really simple and super complex. He’s a bit like Agnes Martin, but with a pop edge. Both artists encourage us to slow down, look closely, and embrace the ambiguity of things.