Ian Hughes "Beyond Form"

532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel

poster for Ian Hughes "Beyond Form"

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Hughes’ acrylic canvases (here represented by paintings in large, medium and small scale) are works of synthesis that re-examine and renew the always delicate relationships between color and space, and between stable flat ground and poured, organic shape.
But Hughes’ work is not simply about the gestalt of poured paint on a flat ground. The paintings beckon viewers to look deeper, beyond the boundaries of what they already know.
A strangely suggestive form may cause the viewer to focus on the center of a canvas. But this volumetric form is related, via color shifts, to an adjacent form, which itself is related to another, then another. This set of internal relationships causes the viewer’s eye to move about the canvas, picking out new ideas. Each interior form in a Hughes canvas can activate a different memory. Taken together, they can create a new universe of ideas for the viewer.
How does he do this? Perhaps it’s Hughes’ technique that causes this startling effect. He grounds each canvas with opaque color, then pours acrylic emulsions on top. The overpouring can be opaque, or it may allow the ground to show through, in differing levels of transparency, on the painting surface. He then selectively repaints, articulating forms, often with sharply contrasting colors. The repainting process can take days, months, or years.
Yet it’s likely that an understanding of the artist’s careful technique doesn’t fully explain the power of Hughes’ work to transport viewers to a palpable yet ephemeral world, where external experience is subsumed to internal feeling. Are these paintings of a “gone” world, or of one to come?

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Schedule

from May 13, 2010 to June 05, 2010

Opening Reception on 2010-05-13 from 18:30 to 20:30

Artist(s)

Ian Hughes

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