Mascot Paintings 

Chris Hood

Opening Reception: November 2nd, 2024

3407 Verdugo Rd. LA CA 90065

GGLA is proud to present Mascot Paintings, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Chris Hood, to be held in the gallery’s main space at 3407 Verdugo Road. The exhibition sees Hood continuing his exploration of a deeply idiosyncratic painting process in which alkyd paints are pressed through the weave of the reverse of the canvas, layer by layer, yielding an unpredictable and entirely unique image on the face of the canvas. Mascot Paintings function as a meditation on control and the lack thereof, explored through a layered means of paint application, tragically inept cartoon avatars, and consistently impending yet sublime natural surroundings. 

Mascots–those strange avatars that carry the attitudes, identities, and vested dreams of high schools and sports teams, or the cute and cuddly faces of thoroughly boring and bureaucratic insurance companies, serve as the carriers of a loose narrative that weaves throughout Hood’s latest body of work. Yet for the artist, the mascots he employs are appropriated amalgamations from advertisements and clipart-style animation, speaking more to the human condition than they do the passions of a city’s sports culture. The heads of the figures are predominantly obscured or cut off, largely devoid of facial figures with the occasional set of teeth or eyes peering through, serving to anonymize the characters and present them as an open-ended archetype. Without facial features to read into, we’re left to puzzle about body language instead, grasping for the emotional state and well-being of these figures. Much like the artist’s painting process in which Hood strikes a delicate balance between restraint and total freedom as the paints absorb and bleed through the canvas, the figures are caught in a fight for self-determination, fingers grasping at thin air, freefalling. Furthering this loss of bodily autonomy, are the ways that figures are broken up, repeated, fractured, and stretched across compositions. This type of image morphing feels more akin to the internet and Photoshop than classical art history, creating an interesting push and pull between digital image-making tools and a deeply analog painting process.

Yet as engrossing as the mascots are, the dynamic backgrounds and surrounding scenes that situate these anxious figures further the exploration of emotional states, while displaying the fascinating ways in which Chris Hood builds and collapses space through layered paint application. Many of the scenes feature sublime natural landscapes, however, a closer inspection reveals trees on fire, falling rocks, or the rush of a waterfall, only serving to heighten the frenzied state of the animated characters. Despite the relatively foreboding elemental occurrences, the subtle ways in which Hood masterfully constructs his paintings, placing colors next to each other, interrupting fields of color with stained splashes or staccato slashed marks, provides levity and pleasure in optically dissecting the rich canvasses that contrast the darker emotional states contained within.