For Adam Hennessey’s third solo show at New Art Projects ‘Adam and Steve’ he looks back to his awkward teenage years growing up gay in the 1990’s. Hennessey describes his new paintings as “memory fantasies”. He uses a reduced palette of greens, to create an artificial light that helps to set the scenes in them, in the past. Like watching an old film or discoloured home movie the figures move through a distorted green haze acting out his teenage dreams and desires.
In his autobiographical comic ‘Tank’ he makes light of having crushes on his then school friends and navigating a house party where the aim was to lose his virginity.
As with his comics, each painting seems to be one frame that informs the next, making a kind of comic strip of dreamscapes around the gallery that hark back to the days before online dating and the mobile phones to the days of loud dial up modems and phone boxes.
