James Hillman ( b. 1992, London, United Kingdom) lives and works in Isola Del Liri, Italy. Hillman’s work develops from the joining of bucolic notions of craftsmanship and mechanised manufacturing processes with Western romantic motifs. This often results in the generation of images that blur classical painterly languages with languages of industrial fabrication and digitality.
Hillman’s work evolves around a constant experimentation of the material form. His paintings go through a process of layering, de-layering and eroding until an image appears. Through painting’s inherent material qualities or a breakdown in the use of pictorial perspective, a key preoccupation of Hillman’s work is the relationship between an image/painted surface and its underlying physical support. His sculptural motifs present historical symbolism, from the imagery of the circle, cross, and palm. Its effect is used to disorder, re-contextualise and imbue them with new meaning. In that sense, it is an opposite and complimentary process to one of the paintings.
