"Step and Screw: First Cursed Ghost Guest," 2022, belongs to an ongoing series of mixed media canvases in which Trenton Doyle Hancock imagines a meeting between his alter-ego Torpedoboy, a black superhero, and one of the buffoonish Klansmen who populated Philip Guston’s paintings. Hancock prizes the ambiguity and 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, the Klansman hands Torpedoboy a lightbulb, villain and hero facing off in this familiar episode of exchange. Text embedded within the painting both alludes to narrative and acts as a central visual component. The numbered words, read in order, create a fragmented sort of alliterative poetry within the bodies of the two central figures. The title is drawn from the first four words of this sequence: FIRST / CURSED / GHOST / GUEST. Dense faux fur is collaged onto the surface of the work, surrounding Torpedoboy and the Klansman. The introduction of this tactile element gives a perverse sense of creaturehood to the painting itself.

The full text reads:
1. FIRST CURSED
2. GHOST GUEST
3. GUESSED GEIST
4. GUST GUISED
5. JUST JEST
6. EAST WEST
7. FEAST FAUST