Patrick Hughes at Flowers West - Brief Article

Veteran British burst artist Patrick Hughes is best known for meticulously returned images of landscapes and interiors featuring optical tricks or what the artist directs to as "paradoxical perspectives." Inspired by the agency of de Chirico, Magritte and Duchamp (especially his Etant donnes), Hughes has been showing since the 1960 works in which incongruous architectural uncompounded bodys and punning illusionism defy all visual logic. In individual of his best-known images, Leaning upon a Landscape (1979), a stylized rainbow resting against a sky-colored wall casts a dark shadow as if it were an opaque thing The first of Hughes's so-called sticking-out pictures, Sticking without Room (1964), is a beveled relief in which a schematic interior appears to recede into the wall in spite of the fact that the surface it's painted upon protrudes several inches outward.

The 15 new oil-on-wood relief paintings in this exhibition, titled "The Movies," are elaborate and refined variations of the sticking-out pictures. In these works, which range from about 26 by the agency of 47 by 6 inches to 4 by the agency of 10 by 2 feet, Hughes uses a multipanel format in which an arrangement of identical lines of tall vertical wedges be likes an oversized accordion. The right-hand surface of each wedge is part of a single image, while the left-hand panels form a separate composite image. The artist directs to these pieces as "moving pictures," and they are interactive to a stage since only viewers approaching the works from certain angles will notice that the images look to move. Walking through the gallery, individual senses that the landscapes appear to shift, and, perhaps greatest in quantity disconcertingly, objects seem to flip back and forth from foreground to background.

In Pleasure Island, for example, a tall fulvous door seems to open, revealing a lush, tropical beach view While contemporary artists ranging from Lichtenstein to Agam have toyed with similar illusionistic devices, Hughes has taken the idea to an uttermost From a distance Hughes Henge appears to be a simple, stylized image of Stonehenge. upon closer inspection, however, the image takes upon a physical aspect, as if single were actually strolling among the ancient ruins. While Hughes's playful and ultra-slick experiments might be dismissed as simple sleight of hand, ultimately his work is a serious and provocative exploration of perception. [An exhibition of new works by Patrick Hughes also appeared at Louis K Meisel in novel York, April 8-29.]

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