The face is familiar ...
Tom Hunter reworks Old Masters to produce modern urban images that evoke waking nightmares
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Tom Hunter: Living in Hell and Other Stories
National Gallery, London WC2, until 12 March
National Gallery, London WC2, until 12 March
As the first photograph to be exhibited in the National Gallery, it would be hard to improve on Tom Hunter's Woman Reading a Possession Order. The picture has been around for so long now - it won the John Kobal photographic award in 1998 - that it is threatening to take on the indelible quality of the Vermeer it so perfectly and poignantly references. However many double-takes it inspires, you can't resist just one (or two) more.
That uncanny portrait, and the subtle questions of pathos and aesthetics that it raised, also led Hunter into a career of recreating Old Masters on the streets of east London; this is a comprehensive show of the results. As he explains in the video that accompanies his large-scale photographs, his methods have become entrenched since that first success. His ideas come through the door. He waits for a headline in his local paper, The Hackney Gazette, that seems properly graphic or extreme - 'Hallowe'en Horror: Trick or Treat Thugs Break Mum's Bones', say - and when he has one he lets it settle in his head and find its own painted equivalent.
Part of the fun of this is the guessing game of which photo refers to which painting (the answers are given in postcard-sized reproductions beside the pictures). Some are easy enough. A burnt-out car on a piece of industrial wasteland stands in for Millais's country graveyard in The Vale of Rest; the two nuns are replaced by a couple of travellers round a bonfire. Sometimes it is more of a stretch. It's a long way, say, from a boy fishing where a man's body floats - a gangland murder victim - to Constable's Stratford Mill
The pictures deal with rape and suicide and drunkenness and they invite voyeurism, as tabloid headlines do. The transforming trick is in the tonal and structural ghosts of their original inspiration, something resolutely beautiful retouching something grim. That balance seems properly purposeful in the Vermeer recreation, although by repetition it becomes more troubling.
In Ye Olde Axe, a stripper in a low-rent pub thrusts her bum with its strap of thong towards Hunter's camera, while observing herself in a mirror. An impatient line of her colleagues wait their turn on the floor. The composition is a clear pastiche of Velazquez's Rokeby Venus, although the power relations involving the sitter are changed. In place of a mischievous cherub we a have a suited punter with an earring and shades on a bar stool, and instead of reclining on the artist's bed, the subject is flat out on a beery carpeted floor, wondering how she got here.
In The Dolphin, another of Hackney's strip-and-sawdust pubs, a barmaid with a look out of Manet's At the Bar of the Folies-Bergeres stares at Hunter's camera, with much of the glazed contempt that another stripper in the background reserves for her client, as she removes a feather boa. The gaze of the artist feels as exploitative as that of the client - the boredom of a woman being sized up by a man working in a place that exists for just that purpose. (This one really makes you want to return to the Manet and think again about the look that inspired it.)
Hunter is adamant that the intent of his pictures remains the same as for the original light-drenched Possession Order. In an interview last week he suggested that he wanted the viewer to wonder if 'there is something quite magical going on there, and universal?' He has earned the right to look at the crises and horrors of his neighbours in this aesthetic way, he suggests, because he has lived in Hackney for so long, first as a squatter. He is fixedly local. Vermeer, who hardly ever left Delft, and who painted his own friends and neighbours and made them universal with his use of light, seemed absolutely right for this kind of appropriation; it is harder to see how other inspirations, Poussin or Piero di Cosimo, fit Hunter's project.
There is something uncomfortably stagey in this respect about, say, For Batter or Worse, a wedding fight outside Hackney Town Hall between family groups of redheaded Irish and Vietnamese locals, which is asked to be reminiscent of Di Cosimo's The Fight between the Lapiths and the Centaurs. It's too much of a put-up job. The picture offers neither emotional documentary or clever art history but falls flat in between.
The most problematic portrait in this sense is the title piece Living in Hell, which uses as its triangulation point Four Figures at a Table, a 17th century painting by the Le Nain brothers, of a family apparently resigned to their poverty. Hunter makes the scene even more terrible, removing the family from around the seated old woman, adding the infestation of vermin - he stuck several hundred dead cockroaches to the wall of a friend's flat and arranged a few more on a half-eaten pizza. There is anger in this, but you can't help feeling a photograph of the reality would be much more affecting. As a protest picture, it has far less force than those family snaps of Richard Billingham, say, or Graham Smith's Middlesbrough pub drinkers.
In among the arc lights and colour saturation, Hunter is capable of genuine shock, though. There are nightmarish scenes here, graphically realised. A sex assault by three drunks at a bandstand in the park, in which a pale flash of the victim's flesh is exposed like a side of meat in the twilight is the most invasive of images. There is violence of one sort or another in almost every picture, and Hunter will not have you looking away.
His point, I suppose, is that all human life (and death) is just outside your door, particularly in Hackney. There is nothing that you can find in all the collected imaginations of the National Gallery that you cannot find in your local freesheet. As art criticism, his best photos make Old Masters look like front-page news. At the very least the juxtaposition makes you want to run off to the gallery's four corners and look again at the real thing.
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