Marc Hulson and Esther Planas

painting drawing photography

3 March to 9 April 2000

For their joint exhibition Marc Hulson and Esther Planas will explore the potential of the house as a setting or context for obsessional fantasy, for reverie, for the construction of imaginary narrative. Each artist in a different sense confronts the symbiotic relationship between the imaginary worlds of childhood and the obsessional fantasies of adulthood – and in the process inevitably invokes the transitions and intensities of adolescence.

Their works emerge from a kind of focused game-play with obsessional fantasy and the various media and generic forms through which imaginary narratives find expression. For both artists fantasy is the site where childlike enchantment and adult fixation intermingle and become equivalent, and the house, the domain of intimacy – as the space in which the rites and passages of transition between the two are played out. – is the architectural setting in which the blurring of real and imaginary is archetypally dramatised. If only in so far as the house is the first place in which many of us encounter the forbidden, as a flickering late-night trace on a TV or computer screen (doorways into other dimensions), then this analogy holds true. But also, of course, our homes are host to the spaces in which we experience our first nightmares and erotic fantasies, not-yet equipped with any mental structures to explain to ourselves where they came from or why, spaces in which magazines, pictures, objects and books exercise unreasonable holds over our emotional responses, where rooms assume new and unfathomable identities in our absence.

The house is where we read stories, watch movies, get lost in narrative – where phantoms find form, take shape … narrative is where we get lost …

Marc Hulson studied at Goldsmiths College – Recent exhibitions: 1998 – United in Death, Cambridge Darkroom; What is a Photograph?, Five Years, London; Playing and Reality, Salon 2, London; Silent Movies, Five Years, London; 1999- Interior / Interior, Danielle Arnaud, London; A thousand moonlit kisses (solo show), Five Years, London; 2000 – Dark Pop, Five Years, London.

Esther Planas was born in Barcelona. She first trained as a dancer before starting art school but soon resumed her studies in contemporary dance. She published and edited the short-lived but influential VO magazine in Barcelona (1984 – 85) and has now launched the fanzine/artist’s book Dark Star. She has her own band Dirty Snow in which she sings. She started exhibiting as a painter in 1988. Her recent exhibitions include Animal Beauty (Danielle Arnaud, 1998) and What is love (Five Years, 1999) and the solo projects ‘Raining Insomnia (1998) and Red Rum (1999) in Barcelona.