LUKE HANNAM
GOD’S BODY & THE DEVIL’S CHAINS

I was messaged recently by a social media ‘friend’ that this title sounded like a Nick Cave song - his latest book, after all, is called ‘Hope, Faith and Carnage’. I like this comparison; I like Nick Cave. I like his courage to wrestle with the big themes of God, loss, love, religion, spirituality, no embarrassment shown, all pretensions embraced. in conversation with Sean O’Hagen stated: “The word ‘spirituality’ is a little amorphous for my taste. It can mean almost anything. Whereas the word ‘religious’ is just more specific, perhaps even conservative, has a little more to do with tradition.” I respond to the courage of this statement. I may not understand it fully, but I believe it. I like to grapple with ideas greater than my understanding. To lay my hands on that nagging sense of doubt, and embrace that clear feeling of being ‘damned if you do and damned if you don’t’. The eternal dysfunction of life itself, the hostility, the confusion, the demonic dynamism and the eternal quest for meaning all offer an impetus.

For me the exhibition title refers to what Leonard Cohen spoke of as “a bittersweet”, a need he felt to maintain a belief that everything springs from the tension of opposites. Fantasy occurrences dreams and visions, images of what I would like to be yet fear to become. Painting over the last two years has been a series of encounters with what Carl Jung called “a very real truth.” A facing up to the shadow self, a synesthesia of mind body and soul, an encounter with the subconscious. The characters in my paintings are all me, male and female, good and bad, moral and amoral, earthly and unearthly. These characters are intuitively drawn from a theatrical world of fantasy, myth, religious iconography and more recently from Jung’s list of the universal archetypes, which he termed the collective subconscious.

There has been an exhilarating, terrifying yet somewhat affirming realisation that my visual senses are perhaps helmed, not by the outside world, but somewhere deep within my own Psyche. The paintings are in a very real sense manifestations, a call to being, an attempt to give form to an internal theatre, a script written by the Psyche to be followed through in everyday life. Jung spoke of a demonic dynamism, the shadows made visible with the purpose being to integrate the darker side of ‘Self’ with the so-called civilised consciousness. My paintings depict hostility, stasis, desire, cognitive dissonance, longing, yearning, fulfilment and emptiness. Titles such as ‘The Hypnotist’, ‘The Contortionist’, ‘The Sleeping Yo-Yo’, ‘The Puer Aeturnus’ and ‘The Death of the Child’ are deliberate references to Jung’s research into the structure of the archetype and have helped me to recognise and give life to these psychological and mythological states of mind. The drawings included in the show, a selected glimpse of my prolific outpouring, reveal the process by which these images emerge. Complex, frenetic, inter woven, entanglements or contradiction, tension, everything all at once coexisting. Images on the cusp of mania or an overwhelmed and overcrowded inner world at times claustrophobic and beyond my control, spill out. I must not fear overstatement, so I don’t - I embrace it. Scale, complexity, ideas beyond my own knowledge, all, in the end, rely on my deep faith in humanity and firm belief that love will find a way.

Luke Hannam, 2023