The sustained work of Hugh Hood … provides a connection between the realistic and stylistically experimental…. [White Figure, White Ground] is imbued with an interest in Sartre and Genet, and observes how a painter strives to distinguish between a libertinism he despises and a healthy acknowledgment of his sexual being, and how in his work he tries both to succeed and to paint that which is invisible—light sources rather than colours. But these ideas lie on the surface fairly overtly. The painter observes at one point:

I've always depended on form. I'm a very formal painter but I never realized how much till I started this thing. Form is illumination: the phrase likely occurs in some text-book somewhere. I seem to recall something about splendor veri and inner radiance, and the clarity of the intelligible in the sensible, and all that jazz….

The conversational tone but formally argumentative...