1599fdT is thrilled to announce the opening of Cartoon Romantic, Chris Hood’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Featuring a new series of small-scale paintings, Cartoon Romantic draws attention to motifs like candelabras and moons, which are depicted swaying and dragging across the surface of the paintings.

These figures represent a common cultural vernacular that creates cartoonish and emotive compositions. Hood employs a painting technique where pigment is pushed from behind and through the weft, resulting in the motifs becoming entangled into a structure of varying shapes pressed through with stains and brushstrokes of layered color.

The exhibition plays on light and looking themes, with the moon and candelabra traditionally being recognized as romantic sources of inspiration and meditation. In these paintings, these symbols are portrayed as tangled and sagging, creating a humorous and evocative mood, blurring the lines between the sardonic and the numinous— the revelatory and the everyday.