A man working late into the night is beset by personal demons — little pitchforked ones. They swirl over his head, competing for his attention with winged angels carrying harps, all of whom he attacks with the indiscriminate application of a flyswatter. That the man and these manifestations of good and evil all share the same physiognomy doesn't deter him from wielding his wooden weapon.

Regardless of his determination, there seems little promise that the hero is involved in a winning battle, though he's too slight of a figure to incur real demonic wrath anyway. This blend of whimsy and defeat appears throughout this collection of Teun Hocks' painted photographs. In image after image, there is hope (a struggling sapling rising from a rocky ground), labor (a watering can encouraging it forth), and, finally, concession (a rope coiled around the sapling, ending in a noose). A singular figure — the artist himself, but dubbed the Everyman in the introductory essay by Art in America editor Janet Koplos — pits himself against nature, as represented by a dark Dutch landscape, or against his own physical and mental shortcomings, with a steadfastness that borders on lunacy.

Koplos writes that the essence of Hocks' work, "like a good political cartoon," can be captured by a pithy sentence or two. While this is certainly true on one level, the artist's attention to detail (and his aversion to titling) makes each work a self-contained, unanswerable mystery. Is the painter who turns an idyllic landscape into a scene of violent turbulence revealing a troubled conscience, or quixotic dreams of escape? Whose smoking rifles protrude menacingly from an otherwise pathetically weather-beaten shack? It is in these questions that Hocks makes the viewer, too, an everyman — after all, few qualities are as universal as uncertainty. And it is here that the displacement of Chaplin farce to a Bruegel field turns disquieting, fascinating, and deeply touching.

-Grace Labatt