Tragedy is Dead and Poetry has Perished with It.

Plato’s Closet features a suite of five new paintings which further Hull’s investigations and research into the imagery and allure of antiquity. After a City University of New York fellowship took the artist to Athens in 2018, Hull was puzzled by a dream. Finding himself within a dusty stone amphitheater, a mysterious group surrounded him and a startling mask with dark eyes and mouth of infinite depth gestured an indecipherable dance. Resembling a Greek chorus or perhaps a pre-socratic mystery cult, Hull was certain that the dream delivered an indelible image, which from a Jungian perspective, spoke to the existential dread contained in our contemporary collective unconscious.

Inspired by both the evocative dream and a recent re-reading of Neitzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, the recent work features theater masks inspired by the Greek chorus, images of Dionysius and his retinue, and an Apollonian approach to the picture plane. If Apollo is the rational builder of things, Dionysius is the intuitive deconstructionist. The paintings are created in the dialectical space between the two Ancient Greek deities and it appears that Hull's psychic reality resides in both the contemporary and ancient world.

The repeated motif of the tragedy mask is also offset by imagery of various theatrical players and mythological beings; all of which point to Hull’s preoccupation with the iconography of pre-Socratic mystery cults, images of homosexual acts from antiquity and a general sense of an absurdist archeology. As Emily Weiner wrote in a 2014 Artforum review, “...Hull works with a mixed bag of cultural symbols, containing both humor and reverence- an alchemical recipe that grounds the modern artist’s mark in a long lineage of scrawls and satires.”

The exhibition is titled Plato’s Closet. The name directly references a thrift store chain that specializes in recycling and repurposing goods. Perhaps this is what Hull is working towards in the discursive paintings; a re-interpretation and re-use of images and forms from antiquity, squeezed, thrown about and dragged into the contemporary. What is old is new again, what is imagined is made manifest. Plato’s Closet is also a cheeky, campy nod to the “closet” as a furtive, secret space; a cabinet of sorts. Who doesn’t love the mystery of what lies behind a closet door? Forget Plato’s cave; it’s his closet that contains multitudes.