Installation view @ The New School House Gallery, 2011

Installation view @ Transit, Mechelen, Belgium, 2007

Forthcoming

Solo Exhibitions: -

Wolverhampton Art Gallery, February - May 2013

Group Exhibitions: -

'Digital Romantics' (curated by David Hancock) 4 February - 13 May 2012, Dean Clough, Halifax
'Digital Romantics' (curated by David Hancock) 22 August - 30 September 2012, Aubin Gallery, London

David is currently undertaking a PhD at University of Salford

Statement

David Hancock work concentrates on the notion of a 'Generation X'. He attempts to make palpable in his work the psychological gap between the world that we physically experience and the psychological states through which it is apprehended.

Hancock achieves this by choosing a semi-photorealist technique, yet he attempts to show a form of escapism, whether through youth subcultures or by directly referencing historical utopian visions. His paintings are drawn from a narrative base, which is supplied through a network of acquaintances and based upon real experiences. His technical virtuosity is captured on canvas with posed portraits of youngsters doing their thing in their own particular way. Through Hancock's paintings, anonymous kids become literary heroes and historical figures, transcendent through the large scale of the works.

His work is rooted in the tradition of Romanticism or the Victorian utopian visions of Ruskin, Morris and Pre-Raphaelitism. The signifiers are taken from historical works of art, sources and themes. These are suggested through the appropriation of composition, gestures or objects. In the use of paint, combined with a traditional method of realisation, as well as the choice for a large scale, these works claim a historical significance, elevating the status of the paintings, and subsequently transporting these works to an era when myth, symbolism and truth to nature were prevalent in art.

He chooses to create, however, a series of Urban Myths or contemporary moral tales. The photogenic aspect of his technique allows him to play with the viewer's notions of reality, drawing them into certain details embellished from the narrative. The result is a two-dimensional environment, which is created by tiny iridescent brushstrokes. This handmade, yet effectively computer-like effect allows the viewer to literally step inside the painting, or the matrix.

His work made around photographic images of youths provides a different window onto the world of growing up in the glare of our obsessive photographic reality. David Hancock documents a generation who wishes to believe in Utopia, but suffers from the knowledge of its decline. His work portrays a society that is unrealistic or unable to realize itself, through actual communities founded in attempts to create an ideal society. With his contemporary language he offers to his models to leave a statement and exist for eternity, in opposition to the Warholian affirmation of 15 min of fame.

Whilst Hancock's Generation X is still well and truly alive and eternalised in his work, his technique and ultimate aim is anything but nihilistic. On the contrary it reminds of the maligned and re-discovered works of Alma Tadema, which managed to hit a nerve despite being controversial at times.

Photo-realism is an agenda that is under discussion with a number of contemporary painters and, yet, is viewed from a critical distance, as if it was a blip of the Seventies. Ironically it was in the Seventies that Alma-Tadema's work was re-discovered as significant. Hancock's work is concerned with opening up the possibilities that exist at the juncture between painting and photography: using both mediums as part of a broader conceptual examination of the resonance between the cult of the individual and anonymity in todays media saturated world.

text by Melanie Moreau