The work of Trenton Doyle Hancock is un­der­pin­ned by a vast and complex mythology, Homeric in scope and Biblical in tone.

The Mounds are good. The Vegans, deformed through in­breed­ing, are evil. Except for St. Sesom, that is. The visionary mystic, inspired by dreams in tech­n­i­co­l­our, and his followers - a gang that includes the conjoined twins Baby Curt and Shy Jerry, Bow-Headed Lou and Betto Watchhow - have long been waging a campaign to convert their fellow Vegans into loving the Mounds, instead of murdering them, and eating the pink moundmeat that oozes from them raw, instead of con­ver­t­ing it into tofu, as is their current practice. This change in diet will, St. Sesom says, allow the Vegans to find 'spectral happiness', cor­rect­ing a mutation in their makeup that makes them see in black and white. But - wait! -all is not well in Sesom's camp, his merry band are riven with factional in­fight­ing, caused in part by the saint's inflated ego, and a terrorist group, Black Brain, are causing trouble. It is also worth noting that, at some point in the distant past, the Mounds came into being when an ape-man, Homer­bac­tus, ejac­u­lated into a field of flowers, and the Vegans are des­cend­ants of Homer­bac­tus too, the fruits of an in­ces­tu­ous re­la­tion­ship between Brouthes­cam and Cromalyna, his children.

At least, I think that's what's going on. Hancock's tales are spun out in text daubed on the gallery wall, as well as paintings, drawings and sculpture; the narrative flowing between different media, the canonical version of the story im­pos­s­ible to glean without being fully immersed inside the in­stal­l­a­tion.

'The narrative exists as a grid,' Hancock explains, 'I had been creating char­ac­ters for several years, making portraits of char­ac­ters - really self-portraits of different aspects of myself - and I had no real intention of turning it into a mythology. But after graduate school, I was looking for a voice. I had made all these char­ac­ters that existed on their own, and I needed a way to tie them all together, I invented the narrative to develop a dialogue between these paintings, these char­ac­ters, and, actually, between modes of operation - per­for­m­ance, sculpture, painting, drawing.'

This last point is key. For, though the tales of St. Sesom & Co. may appear to be, well, a wee bit silly, they are the glue that binds together a soph­ist­ic­ated, densely layered practice. At its heart is an al­chem­ic­al mingling of languages, textual and visual. Hancock's writing does not describe his images, nor do his images il­lus­trate his texts, instead, there is a fluid interplay between the two.

'It goes in both dir­ec­tions,' he says, 'with ever­yth­ing meeting up in the middle somewhere. I never know when I'm going to have to amend the story to fit something in from a painting, or whether there's going to be some sort of organic offshoot that is out of my dir­ect­or­i­al control. Sometimes I just have to follow.'

This admixture of the lin­guist­ic and visual is matched by a jackdaw approach to in­flu­ences. A typical Hancock painting, if there is such a thing, draws on comic and fantasy art, borrows from Sur­real­ism, Cubism, Modernism--pretty much every -ism you can think of, in fact--and matches sc­ato­lo­gic­al humour with high theory.

'I'm de­f­in­itely very conscious of "the filter",' Hancock says, 'of how I bring in low art or comics, when I'm con­stantly thinking about the history of painting. I try make sense of it all, to make it all coexist.'

Looking at Hancock's in­stal­l­a­tion, which fills both floors of the Fruit­mar­ket to bursting point, it does not make sense according to the usual meaning of the term. The heavily worked canvases clash obsessive, me­t­ic­u­lous detailing against broad brush strokes and clumsily applied felt and bottle tops, depicting tangles of bony arms, or hideous great globs peppered with gaping orifices, all shot through with queasy Pepto Bismol pink, the colour of moundmeat. The allusions are dizzying, too - here Dali struggles against Robert Crumb, there a patch of Cubist ab­strac­tion snuggles up against a child-like doodle.

But, hidden in this all-engulfing flood of images and ideas are hints of order. Hands point and pinch, fists are raised, daggers clasped, sug­gest­ing an un­der­ly­ing code. Words and phrases are repeated in the text scrawled across the gallery walls, swimming into sharp focus. Works play off each other, with shapes recurring and shifting across the paintings and drawings, un­der­s­cor­ing the surface narrative with a sort of formally expressed un­con­s­cious.

Slowly but surely, it is possible to enter Hancock's world, to find darker sub­t­leties in his ap­par­ently obvious allegory of tolerance, and to unearth the deep links between text and image.

So, is Hancock worried that his first solo show in Europe might overwhelm his audience? 'Well,' he says, deadpan, 'they will have to make several trips.'

This preview was first published in The Herald on February 9th, 2007.