ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ

In Dannielle Hodson’s paintings, we encounter a bustling mass of faces, bodies, and ambiguous objects, which gather together with carnivalesque brio in dream- or nightmare-like pastoral landscapes. Charged with an energy that is at once comic, erotic, and incipiently violent, her elliptical motifs feel like they might dissolve, at any moment, back into the primordial matter of pure paint.

The title of Hodson’s exhibition pays tribute to Jorge Luis Borges’ extraordinary short story The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), which centres on an imaginary novel of the same name, written by a retired Chinese civil servant named Ts’ui Pen. Borges relates that what sets its literary approach apart is its steadfast refusal to close down narrative possibilities. While in a conventional novel, when ‘a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the other; in the work of Ts’ui Pen, the character chooses — simultaneously — all of them. He thus creates, thereby, several futures, several times, which themselves proliferate and fork’. The result is a labyrinthine, multiversal and quite possibly infinite fiction, possessed of what we might term quantum realism.

To paint is, of course, to choose. The moment the first brushstroke is applied to the support, the seed of a decision tree is planted, from which the finished painting will grow. Hodson does not seek to escape the (anyway inescapable) imperative to commit to the emergence of an image, but rather radically embraces it, employing multiple and at times contradictory registers to create painted worlds of almost fractal complexity.

Each of her works in ‘Forking Paths’ begins with a process of unplanned, near-automatic mark-making, in which abstract passages of pigment are amassed on the canvas, until the artist detects in them a quality that chimes with a major painting from art history, which she employs as a prompt to create her own riotous, restless visions. Look closely at Hodson’s Intermedium (2025), for example, and we may be reminded of Nicolas Poussin’s The Empire of Flora (1631), while her Pulling strings(2025) appears to channel, with an ebullient lack of decorum, the very different painterly addresses of Titian and Édouard Vuillard. This is not so much an act of quotation, or of translation, as an anchoring of her paintings in the deep past of the medium — something that not only lends them an atmosphere of the Freudian uncanny, in which the familiar becomes unsettlingly strange, but also allows Hodson to explore paths not taken by her forebears, choices they did not and perhaps could not make.

So full of incident are Hodson’s canvases, so densely peopled and so dizzyingly kinetic, that it is impossible to parse them in a single glance. These are paintings that — like Ts’ui Pen’s novel — contain not a single story, but a branching multitude of narratives, which unfold in different ways each time our eye returns to the artist’s pullulating imagery, and to her bravura, highly variegated facture. Are the worlds she depicts our own? If they feel, with their bizarre inhabitants and unearthly physics, very far from our everyday experience, then we might remember this: science suggests that reality is much stranger than our senses — or indeed our intellectual faculties — can grasp. Nevertheless, it obtains, along every forking path.