Born out of his fascination with the woven richness of tapestries and the colour-dense atmospheres of the French post-impressionists, Hodge’s style occupies a liminal space between painting and textile. It is a sensibility shaped by his residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, where he immersed himself in French tapestry traditions while studying the work of painters like Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard. Bonnard’s dense, interlaced brushstrokes, particularly in his interiors and gardens, often resemble woven fabric; Vuillard and his fellow Nabis artists embraced decorative, pattern-laden surfaces that blurred the boundary between canvas and textile. Hodge channels these precedents not as homage but as a springboard for invention, heightening their mimicry of tapestries through a painstaking, time-consuming process that echoes the labour-intensive craft of weaving.

Using brushes, combs, and custom tools, he drags paint across the surface to mimic the warp and weft of fabric. Layers are built up, only to be partially scraped back, revealing slivers of colour beneath. “By applying and then partially removing layers of paint, I try to create a sense of excavation, as if pulling the light forward from beneath the surface,” he explains. The result: canvases that shimmer like cloth, with a tactile quality that draws viewers in and heightens their awareness of the painting’s material presence.

For visitors, this means that looking is not a singular act but a shifting experience: approach the canvas and one encounters an abstract maze of patterns; step back and an image materialises, one that is fleeting and yet vivid. The longer one studies his work, the more the paintings come alive, alternating between opacity and luminosity, and surface and depth.

If contemporary culture teaches us to skim, Echo insists on slowness. It is ultimately a body of work that resists immediacy, instead asking for a different rhythm: one of patience, attention, and reverie. Presented in the gallery’s ascetic spaces, Hodge’s paintings remind us that looking is not passive, but much more participatory; that to truly see requires time.