In "Step and Screw: The Approach," 2020, Hancock revisits an earlier work titled Step and Screw!, extracting and enlarging a graphic image onto ink and paper collaged onto canvas. In these works, the artist imagines a meeting between his alter-ego Torpedo Boy, a black superhero, and one of the buffoonish Klansmen who populated Philip Guston’s paintings. Hancock prizes the ambiguity and the mutability of this moment, and has returned to it again and again. As he notes: “The more you dissect the image, the more it becomes fraught with historic tension and with my own history as a painter. It keeps feeding itself as an image. The item that is exchanged between them changes the narrative each time.”

In this work, Torpedo Boy takes a lightbulb from the Klansman’s outstretched hand and raises a foot to step onto the stool between them. The scrambled letters of the word “Screw” are a twisting echo of the gesture he is about to undertake. Hancock’s black and white palette strips the formal and narrative elements in this series of works down to their studs to create paintings of pure graphic intensity. This binary palette is also suggestive of the oppositional, universal forces embodied within the characters of Torpedo Boy and the Klansman—good and evil, Black and white, light and dark—yet leaves space for all the gray in between.