In this new body of work Marie Claire Hamon sets the stage for a game of victor and victim, hunter and hunted. It is a game that has been played since the dawn of civilisation between man and beast, those with power and those without, but it is also a game that will go on ad infinitum, manifesting itself in new forms and taking on new rules. This game begins with Hamon’s burnished re-appropriation of the aristocratic hunt scene from 15th Century artist Paolo Uccello’s Hunt by Night (1465-1469). In this painting she retains Uccello’s patterning of figures but in place of the original’s geometric network of trees looms a vast and unguessable hinterland.

There is a process of revealing and concealing in Hamon’s practise. Her velveteen layers of colour and the plush, thick carpets and draperies of her painted interiors reveal a density of allusion to the decorative nobility of Renaissance and baroque art. At the same time there is a suggestion that these layers might also conceal Kafkaesque secrets and power plays that are destined to forever remain enclosed within the impenetrable walls of the castle, ever spurning the intrigue of onlookers.

In her role as ‘invisible storyteller’ Hamon articulates this intrigue at the helm of this circular narrative of secrets and games. In paint she tells of a game which began with a medieval hunt but has since moved on, dispersing its poetic vestiges and relics across her canvases: A grand piano playing its wayward tune, an iced cherry party cake ready to be devoured, and finally the noble figure of the stag – a victim of the hunt releasing its last wounded bellow. The stag is traditionally figured as a symbol of power and nobility and like ‘the castle in a bubble’ it holds secrets impenetrable to the language of man. Hamon’s stag emerges from behind this impenetrable darkness. The animal stands as if on centre stage, flanked on either side by luminescent yellow bands; like Gustav Klimt’s sensual borders, the roses that adorn these bands at once embellish and decorate but also exquisitely wound the surface of the painting. Framed as such Hamon asks us to focus on the animal’s raw physicality, foregrounding the beast as both sacred and accursed object of sacrifice.

Above all, Hamon’s new body of work is an exploration of the politics of time, space and place. Her canvases are portals into a kaleidoscopic array of space, distance, interiors and exteriors; the space of man and of beast, private space and the public stage. Familiar, strange and tinged with intrigue, Hamon’s paintings are imagined provinces, freed from the ‘cuckoo clock’ constraints of time and realism they evoke a certain ancient and primal magic, yet it is an uncanny magic that still resonates in the collective imagination of the present.

Layla Hamon, June 2011