In his recent work, Hoge Day continues his ongoing exploration into the Pop Art traditions of commercial design. His brightly colored new oil on panel paintings; For the mouth in your head, reveal his own idiosyncratic interest in the confluence of the sensual and the plastic. Day combines softly painted passages of abstracted biomorphic imagery, of fleshy body parts or juicy food with clear crisp reduced shapes referencing sign painting and abstracted lettering. His immediate inspiration for the new work is the advertising on the sides of ice cream trucks, grocery store circulars, and the plastic food displays found in Chinese restaurant windows. By intentionally choosing these somewhat repulsive depictions of food for his starting place he then sets himself the task of creating, through the medium of painting, real objects of desire.

Utilizing a softener brush he meticulously smooths out his layers of paint creating a delicious and subtle surface. Hoge Day paints with the skill of an artist who has studied and admired the old masters and their ability to paint the sheen on a bowl of peaches. He has a painterly approach to Pop reminiscent of the early Warhol's which reveal the presence of the artist's hand. Day strives for the visual seduction that has always been the provenance of painting, and now inhabits the world of advertising.

There is a certain pathos in these works, revealing our cultures disquiet with our filtered relationship to what nourishes and spikes our appetites. Day has written of his work "The sphere of my work is full of fleshy objects of desire and doubt which resemble many things in the world but have in common a morphological pressure; the feeling that they have grown to fit the shape of the hunger or the idea that created them and wishes to receive them. I gravitate to a kind of anthropomorphic humor, a slightly embarrassed dignity, a subtle leer. I want to create objects that have a living quality, things that not just stain but breathe in the memory." These new paintings by Hoge Day tease us with their idiomatic humor and then ultimately satisfy us and our need for visual and sensual pleasure.

-Rene Lynch

Hoge Day lives and works in Brooklyn. As well as exhibiting in previous group shows at metaphor, he has had solo and group exhibitions in other cities outside of NYC including; Scottsdale and Tucson AZ, the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY, and Connecticut College, New London, CT. He received his MFA from Bard College, Annandale, NY and his BFA from Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City MO . He has been awarded a number of artists fellowships including the MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Millay Colony. Day's work is represented in the public collections of the Phoenix Art Museum, McDonald's Corporation, Arizona State University, City of Phoenix, Artisoft Corporation, and the Tucson Museum of Art.