About the work 

By combining process painting and abstraction with found and collected graphic artifacts from promotional adverts and poster art, Lincoln Penn Hancock’s new work mines late twentieth-century visual vernacular to imbue the everyday with new indications and meaning. Interrogating cultural arenas such as sport and the art market, Hancock locates material resonances through intuitive juxtapositions of paint and print; commercial and poetic expression. He leverages improvised applications of color and collage to coax the emergence of images exploring memory, meaning, and modernity.

Hancock references idiomatic forms of recall and celebration through subversive acts of détournement. Merging the visual rhetorics of painting and graphic design, he creates work that asks viewers to reconsider their own relationships with prevailing emotional narratives. The paintings circumvent a linear response, acknowledging that the gap between the facts and our experience of them is, in fact, a productive space. In Hancock’s work, everything accrues into layered objects and experiences that refer to specific histories, but speak for themselves as living records of a spontaneous studio process. 

In his essay “Against the Weather,” William Carlos Williams describes the tyranny of dead and copied forms inherited from the past — “the accumulated weight of a thousand voices” — that admonish attempts to evoke new truths. “The structure of the old is active, it says no!,” the poet warns. As a response to the heavy imposition of expectation and pre-fixed interpretation in the studio, Hancock relies on a mantra adapted from Williams: “EVERYTHING THAT WANTS TO SAY YES.” Keeping the prescribed historical take of an auto-critical apparatus at arm’s length, Hancock continues working towards a full embrace of the new.