This section contains a selection of articles and exhibition reviews. Selected writings to be added.

Tom suspends belief

"Former Met student, Tom Hackney, magnificently throws the world back onto itself at Castlefield Gallery.

When he was a student of fine art at Manchester Metropolitan University, Tom Hackney painted portraits of his girlfriend, Eva. Or rather, he painted photographs of Eva. In his degree show in 2000, there was a portrait of her sitting in a cinema watching a film.She is young and striking and sitting alone out there in the dark. Why don’t you just sidle up and sit next to her?There she is again, on the Tube heading home. Maybe you followed her from the picture house. She’s leaning against the train window, gazing out beyond her own reflection into the black tunnel. Is she re-running the movie in her head?

Ambiguous

Get up close and see if she notices. Creep. It’s a good job they know each other, Tom and Eva. He puts her in some tight spots. Portraits of Eva extemporise the male gaze. The camera is Everyman, ambiguous: Hackney is lover or lecher?

When you and I first see these paintings they may attract our attention because, for some (initially) unfathomable reason, they are faintly disturbing. This is just about the lowest intensity analytical light that could be shone on them. Art historians significantly turn up the wick. Photorealism is a bit of a party trick; a bit of a why-does-a-dog-lick-its-balls sort of rap.

Tom Hackney can make an oil painting look just like a big photograph. So he takes the whole thing further, as anyone who quotes David Lynch as an influence would.

Suspended Belief, his new show at Castlefield Gallery, harps back to the moment when stills photography was (or wasn’t) displaced by the movies.

He and his 35mm SLR camera have ‘discovered’ abandoned movie locations, from southern California to Martha’s Vineyard. Abandoned in the sense that once witnessed by millions - as the ‘natural’ backdrop to ‘fictional’ action in, such as, Planet of the Apes and Jaws - these places with starring roles revert to a sort of geographical anonymity.

The great American landscape is littered with movie set has-beens and drop-outs. In an earlier sequence of paintings of sub-urban LA, Tom Hackney painted 17 Sierra Bonita Apartments from David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, except the building has reverted to its real number on the doorframe, 2910.

These paintings need be little more than a visual tease for film buffs. They look fantastic in a show-biz sort of way. But if connections are made, and your thought processes are engaged, they’re worth considerably more than a night out at the filmworks.

Predatory

American Legion Memorial Bridge, Amity Island is a killer. Big sky, big water, blood-red reflected sun. A painting of a photograph of a film location for Spielberg’s adaptation of Peter Benchley’s book based on the mayor of a New England holiday resort when confronted by the natural instincts of a predatory shark. Jaws blood or reflected sunset? Even the painting’s title suggests some high-minded vote-winning deceit.

One one thousand, two one thousand is a quote from Tobe Hooper’s 1982 film Poltergeist, the film that Spielberg produced at the same time he was making ET; one’s a fantasy, two’s a nightmare.

Tom Hackney makes paintings in the manner of seventies super realists, such as Americans Ralph Goings and Robert Cottingham and, my personal favourite, Paul Roberts. Their technique is impressive, and their images the more arresting for having the heightened air of forgery. There is something craftsman-like about the photorealists.

Tom Hackney uses their language as a parallax; not the surface but the depth, not real but imagined, not naturally occurring, but cogently invented.

His art is exactly that. Pure artifice."

 Phil Griffin