Megaworld Adventure 7 Million AD

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The Hughes Gallery, Surry Hills

by Andrew Frost

What will the world look like in the year 7,000,000 AD? According to the paintings of Matthew Hunt it’ll be a place where space aliens, super computers and deer-headed airliners mix with lions, John the Baptist [home on shore leave from outer space] and the nanobot anti-Christ. Across a suite of gargantuan oil on canvas pictures and a selection of much smaller gouache on paper works and watercolours, Hunt delves into his imagination zone to find imagery that’s both fanciful and autobiographical, conjoining elements of pop culture detritus and cherished memories of family life.

The panoply of sci-fi imagery that finds its way into fine art usually derives from the memory bank of Golden Age cliché, robots and saucers, ray guns and the like. But Hunt’s delicate and detailed works opt for a different approach by inscribing pop culture with Biblical icons to produce the kind of fevered Millenarian imagery beloved of sects and pseudo-religions that imagine post-Rapture existence as a kind of Disney-fied afterlife of lush meadows, smiling children and lions laying down with lambs. The intensity of Hunt’s vision is alleviated by a welcome sense of humour because, although he calls his utopia an “Atlantis gone right” we all know from B movies just how that will end up.

Pic: Matthew Hunt, Gough Witlam on his way to see what the Americans are up to, 2014.
Gouache on paper,
27 x 21cm.  The Hughes Gallery.