Elliott Hundley: Balcony

These layers of meticulously compiled material and mixed-media elements are affixed using industrial fabric pins and interspersed with painterly interventions, creating a melding of foreground and background amounting to a formal distortion. The effect is a boisterous tableau of signifiers that lend credence to the narrative complexities of the artist’s source text, with panels evoking theatrical backdrops, battle advancement maps, or montages of an eternal present. Hundley has described his work as “a contemporary iteration of gestural abstraction,” noting that, “painting is a stage on which I leave evidence of a performance.”

Genet’s The Balcony is set among a brothel in an unnamed city experiencing revolutionary upheaval. As patrons cycle through what amounts to a safe haven amid the tension outside, they unassumingly reveal the myriad and complex ways in which power and desire are refracted through our assumptions of social or moral hierarchies. Hundley’s works, which are titled after key characters in the play—Queen, Madam, Thief, Bishop, General, Judge, Rebel, and Sinner—present an abstracted glimpse into its narrative and motifs of fantasy, illusion, and trickery. In Fall 2021, Hundley will unveil a new 40-ft mural as part of contemporary art triennial Prospect New Orleans that investigates the same text.

Elliott Hundley

Madam, 2021