The art world is filled with iconoclasts: Henri Rousseau, Piero Fornasetti, Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Martin to name just a very few. Though they may be lumped into specific art movements like post-impressionism or abstract expressionism, they really did their own thing and had no credible imitators. Hunt Slonem is one of these.

You always recognize a Slonem work as uniquely his. The gridded rows of butterflies, rabbits, tropical birds and flowers. The extravagance of thickly applied paint. The hatch marks he scores into the impasto. These are all telltale signatures. He has been called a neo-expressionist. But when you consider that this term covers artists as diverse as Anselm Kiefer, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente and Julian Schnabel, the label seems beside the point.

Through Feb. 6, anyone unfamiliar with Slonem’s work can get a primer at Moss Galleries in Falmouth, where gallery owner Elizabeth Moss has installed “Hunt Slonem: Returns to Maine,” a group of nearly 20 paintings the artist created between 2013 and this year. Slonem, who was born in Kittery and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture before graduating from Tulane University in New Orleans, has said that he wants to “heal and uplift people.” If you’re in a funk on a gray winter day, it’s certainly a perfect place to give your spirits a lift.

Slonem’s father was an officer in the Navy, moving the family constantly since the painter’s birth in 1951: Hawaii, Washington State, Virginia, New Hampshire, California and Connecticut, as well as studies abroad in Nicaragua and Mexico. He grew cattleya orchids as a child, and in Managua, he would go to the rain forest after school to collect butterflies and observe the colorful birds. “My whole world was just turned on to color,” he told Art Summit, an online magazine, last year.

But it was more than just the color that wowed the nascent artist; it was an appreciation for the exotic – its vibrancy and lushness, its primal immediacy, its wildness – that became deeply grooved into Slonem’s imagination. This also instilled in him a reverence for nature that is an underlying thread throughout his work. At his studio in New York, Slonem lives with a 40-foot-long birdcage containing a cacophony of tropical birds (over 60 at times, but now, he says, less than that), most of them gifts from friends that were unwanted pets.

What is evident from the works on display at Moss Galleries is that no matter how repetitious Slonem’s subject matter is, his approach to depicting it never stops evolving. The predominant medium is oil on wood panel or canvas. Often, he paints wet on wet, so that colors swirl together, or the hatch marks he makes reveal underlying layers of bright tones. The pigments are lavished onto the surfaces, sometimes great blobs of them protruding almost an inch from the canvas or wood, as in “Catalayas” from 2016. There’s something about this way of painting that feels voluptuous and luscious – like the tropics that impressed him as a child. In “Amazons,” he ramps up the febrile tropical sensuality by deploying energetic brushstrokes and zigzagging lines that animate and electrify the blue ground of the canvas.

In other paintings, Slonem begins by building up fields of color, then simply outlines the fauna – particularly the bunnies – in thick painted lines. Some works, such as “Nirvana in Pinks,” incorporate both oil and acrylic paints to create the ground, but before the animals are outlined, Slonem covers the color with a coat of resin, giving the works a glossy, glamorous sheen. In “Blue Tanzanite” he dispenses with the resin, but mixes diamond dust into the paint, creating an all-over shimmer.

Several of the paintings at Moss Galleries also incorporate metallic paints. When these are framed in gold, as in “Cabbage Butterflies,” they can emanate the beautiful preciousness of a Russian icon or a Persian miniature.

Slonem has never stopped traveling. His exposure to other cultures, with their particular mythologies, literature and imagery, seems also to infuse many of the works with a totemic or shamanic depth that transcends their merely representational beauty. This, in addition to the rich agglomeration of paint, impart a weightiness and substantiality to his paintings that demand you look beyond their prettiness and into their soul.

His bunnies are not of the cute Easter variety. They can appear at once whimsical and knowing, as in “Mongols,” whose single rabbit in an oval frame looks almost as though he can carry on a conversation with you. Other times, especially when they are repeated in substantial numbers in a single work, the rabbits can feel almost lascivious, their connection to sex and fertility quite apparent. (The rabbits have been so popular that they’ve even shown up on fabrics and wallcoverings Slonem developed for Lee Jofa.)

The parrots carry associations with royalty and spiritual guardians (from pre-Colombian and Native American cultures), or with love (in Hindu mythology, they are linked to Kama, the god of love and sex). And butterflies, of course, have long been symbols of metamorphosis and transformation, as well as lightness of being.

There is also something about the scored hatch marks that imply rarity and the specter of extinction. Slonem developed this technique because he so frequently perceived his avian and animal models through the mesh of a cage. But this element seems to pose a number of other questions: Who is inside and who is outside? Are these creatures too frail and delicate to touch? Is the cage a tactic of possession or protection? What exactly does the cage keep out or hold in?

These multiple meanings layered into the works like Slonem’s robust colors, as well as a palpably sultry hothouse intensity, make the work of Hunt Slonem something more than attractive and delightful. They ask you to consider their ephemerality, as well as the ephemerality of all life.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com 

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