Geoffrey Hunter lives and works in Calgary, Alberta. 

Hunter’s most recent paintings continue the artist’s exploration of the relationship between painting and digital media through color, texture, and surface. The first step of the process begins with older paintings or past images – sometimes historical images, sometimes
the artist’s own work. Through a series of underpainting and overpainting, adding and subtracting, canceling and editing, the final
work emerges.

For Geoffrey Hunter, the process of painting is archeological. Archeology is the uncovering of what has been lost: all the conceits of modernist purity, transcendence, and identity. The archeologist transforms remnants into treasure: the debris of civilization is categorized, named, and classified, until it finally becomes Art. These works are a conglomeration of mistakes, erasures, forgotten gestures and the debris of a visual culture found in books, manuals, science, video games, even the Internet. Similar to the society’s reliance on the computer, the computer has become an important tool for the artist. While the computer becomes the inward focus to a microcosmic realm, Hunter’s paintings reach outward to a macrocosmic phantasmagoria. Painting becomes the outward convergence to a macrocosmic combination of real and imagined images. This evolution from copier, to projector, to computer has fueled Hunter’s fascination with the cultural and aesthetic importance of imagery.



In archeology the gaze is often backward. The question of innovation is relative to both culture and loss. These paintings work within the boundary between progression and recovery, repetition and difference, loss and discovery. As an archeologist, Mr. Hunter repeats a pattern of shapes and images in order to find the ruptures within. Surfaces of his paintings are reduced to dots and carefully considered plays of color. Hunter alternately builds then scrapes away the surface of these works to reveal the archeological intent of painting, not as object or artifact, but a search for the possibility of art.