Born in 1974 in Oklahoma and raised in Texas, Trenton Doyle Hancock invented a comic book-inspired character when he was about 10 years old that has populated many of his paintings over his nearly two decade-long career. “Torpedoboy” is a Black superhero who functions as the artist’s alter ego in the fantastical world—rooted in good and evil, and familiar enough to evoke reality—which forms the basis for the storytelling of his oeuvre. In one of Hancock’s most recent bodies of work, he pairs Torpedoboy with the goonish, hooded figures that populate Philip Guston’s paintings—figures that Guston created as a mode of symbolically disarming the klansmen and the domestic terrorism they insight. Highlighting the ongoing terror that Black Americans face in the U.S. today, Hancock has said: “I’ve used the Klansman to represent America’s contract with White Supremacy…in order to highlight the “exchange” or dialogue that Black Americans are forced into daily.” Made of synthetic fur, cut, and adhered to canvas, Hancock’s canvas-based work “Step and Screw: West End Scrap (Four Foot Furry Face Off),” 2021 introduces an additional figure into this dichotomous relationship. In it, a self-portrait of the bespectacled artist, drawing tool in hand, faces Torpedoboy, as a ghostly hood floats between them, propped up by the artist’s other hand. The work’s fuzzy surface, along with the transparency of the image revealing the artist as draftsman, and maker, seem to point to the “thingness” of the artist’s creation and engender it with a life of its own that blurs the lines between black and white.

---