‘Death of Coltelli’, Unheralded Stories series, 2009 - TOM HUNTER

Cibachrome
FRAMED
164.5 x 134.5 x 5
Edition 5/6

For twenty years Tom Hunter has explored history, place and alternative ways of living in and occupying the urban environment. Continuing that project, his new series of ten paired pictures explore the small everyday stories that arrive without fanfare. Delivered as unannounced oral histories, such stories shape the social fabric of a community and lend colour to a locality. These allegorical reconstructions of stories, memories and myths map an urban psychogeography that encompasses experiences imaginatively scaled to the type of epic adventures that perhaps can only ever take place close to home. In these pictures the bounds of a London borough offer up a whole wider world and evoke images of lofty heavens, subterranean hells, verdant jungle, continental plains, mighty rivers and their attendant falls along the banks of the river Lea.

The restaging of historical painterly tableaux in a contemporary setting for which Hunter is perhaps best known is treated in these new works with a precise and focused attention to fragments or details of paintings containing an evocative gesture or specific painterly handling of the human form. Drawing from works by artists as diverse as Eugène Delacroix and Andrew Wyeth, Hunter’s focus is on the body as a vessel for and of storytelling. In Death of Colotti, 2009, he draws on Delacroix’s mammoth tableaux Death of Sardanapalus, 1827 and reconfigures the lineaments in the depiction of an epic mythical tale to tell a story heard about the passing of an Italian immigrant grandmother who had founded a café on Amhurst Road. Hunter isolates the figure and form of a woman who has thrown herself onto Sardanapalus’ bed; her plaintive gesture, tousled hair and the colour of the bedspread is mirrored in the contemporary frame. Hunter’s photographs yield details of their own and the bedroom is marked by the faith and image of one who has passed. This left panel joins with a right structured entirely differently, though complementary in every case. The right panel of Death of Colotti shows the interior of a chapel, which so happens to belong to St. Joseph’s Hospice on Mare Street in central Hackney. The uncanny stillness of each right panel to these ten diptychs owes something to the fact that Tom Hunter has shot these interiors using a pinhole camera fixed with a 5×4 back. The interior location shots represent the social staging, or setting – importantly without the players – against which is pinned the scenario set in the right panel.