Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Though Dutch artist Teun Hocks--performer, photographer, painter--is widely known and shown around the world, this will be his first English-language book. In it, Hocks plays his signature role, which Janet Koplos describes as "an innocent Everyman in an always strange and often funny world," in scenes that range from burlesque to tragicomic. His lonely Buster Keaton-like persona perseveres through odd and unforgiving environments, struggling to find stable ground in an unstable, even absurd, universe. Life's complications and challenges take the form of impossible Rube Goldbergian contraptions fraught with psychological implications. Each engaging image captures one moment of an implied narrative, triggering questions about how the protagonist ever got himself into such a fix and what in the world will happen next. Hocks begins by sketching out various one-man narratives, and then poses himself in a carefully plotted setup against his own painted backdrop. After photographing the scene, he paints in oil on top of the resulting oversize gelatin silver print. In addition to his painted photographs, "Teun Hocks" includes drawings, Polaroids and studio shots that illuminate the artist's creative process. The wit, elaborate technique and rich colors of Hocks's images combine to form an irrepressibly original oeuvre.

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Publishers Weekly Review

The elaborately staged self-portrait photographs of Dutch artist Hocks mine the same deep vein of poker-faced humor one finds in the films of Buster Keaton or the plays of Samuel Beckett, where the indifference of the universe and the insufficiency of human effort are made bearable by elaborately pointless jokes and pratfalls. The effect is not only deeply funny but strangely comforting, what essayist Koplos calls "the salve of humor." Somehow the adventures of Hocks's hapless everyman make our own lives slightly more bearable. In one image he walks with a little house strapped to his back, in another he cries while his tears pool into a waterfall. Demons fly around his desk at night; he stands on a chair and inserts his head into a picture frame. The pictures are as visually rich as they are tongue-in-cheek; working from drawings and constructing backgrounds, Hock makes the photograph and then paints over the result with oils. If fellow lowlander Magritte is a clear point of reference-not least in his puckish disrespect for Newtonian reality-the richness of the background landscapes reference several centuries of Dutch landscape art. This book, which also includes a number of the artist's drawings, is the first monograph on his work to be published in North America. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved