Chambers of Venus

Philip Hanson partakes of the “Chicago Imagists” painters movement, constituted during the late 1960ies. Referring to Pop Art, and raising Pop Art’s topics anew, these painters employ acute colors and surreally rendered objects, focussing once more on the American Way of Life, absurd comics and illustrations, and mass-produced junk of American make. The Chicago Imagists differ significantly, though, from Andy Warhol’s or Roy Lichtenstein’s famed New York Pop Art. Artist Suellen Rocca’s statement puts it in a nutshell: „Both the work in New York and Chicago was very much about popular culture, but the New York work tried to be very objective and impersonal, and the work here was very subjective, very personal. So I say, New York was cool, and we were hot. “ In “Chambers of Venus”, Philip Hanson shows a multitude of secret boudoirs, Venus’s Grotto, the private refuge of the Goddess of Love. This mythical place has forever been a fantasy of many an artist and writer, charged with sexual allusions and primordially male expectations, always fluent the transition from architecture to anatomy. As early as in the 14th century, Geoffrey Chaucer in his famous Canterbury Tales described the character of women born under the sign of planet Venus as follows: “Venus has given her great desire; she cannot withdraw her chamber of Venus from the man who pleases her.” The sexual allusion is unambiguous in Philip Hanson’s “Chambers of Venus”, too. The painting’s structure evokes a cross-section of a multi-storey building – one room adjacent to the next, as in a dollhouse. The interiors are smooth, pastel, mysteriously vacant; twisted columns alternate with vegetal, organic-looking constructional elements; doors lead to indiscernible back-rooms, the anatomy of which is left to the spectators’ fantasy...