Ian Hughes Exhibition

532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel

poster for Ian Hughes Exhibition

This event has ended.

Hughes’ acrylic canvases investigate the delicate relationships between color and space, amplifying the impact of contemporary American abstraction.
Eyes stand in front of Ian Hughes’s paintings. The painter does the same. The language of sight. Do we know how we’ve been fascinated and charmed? How we’ve been captured? In fact, our visual language wipes out the negligible, side events, marginal ones or, borrowing from another metaphor, the painter stands in the wings of performance, defining himself within the perfection of an empty space. But the canvas is never quite empty of vision. It waits for the visibility of the brush: his visible invention. The painting now exists before its existence, otherwise, how will it become what it will be, must be, as in BEING? His solitary decision, brush in hand, a mental palette of colors, shapes, dimensions. His will to convince. But isn’t it as true that the painter is controlled by the paints at hand? Of the pre-existence of paint, a neutral space hidden in a can with a cover, with a name, as if, it too, was already a painting! The painter, at best, works again when he’s not satisfied, but satisfaction is a terrible word! How many times must the viewer pace up and sideways in front of the work? Sometimes, by just calling it work, the viewer strips it of mystery. But viewers like mysteries: that actually prohibits them from seeing what’s there. Then we can all project ourselves into the calculated dimensions of the space of color-meaning, in a space pleasing our eyes, as we stand in wonder at a large canvas, 96×118. Here we also define the wall, the floor, the light, what peers through the window, that is, the outside world, now become a painting. His mobility impressive (makes an impression on us). Then the painting moves in strands of color, yellow strands with an unpredictable black flow. They capture our imagination, our pleasure. They make us dream meanings. If you stare, that’s perfectly understandable, because you’ve been captured. Colors, of course, on course with us. A surprise? It must be as we let the wall holds a perfection. Let’s say, the smaller ones, 36×44: there, isn’t it always a quest (ion)? For us to translate corporal shapes in winding boa colors, as if a body of colors was there, in front of us, a projection of a textured imagination on the move. Ian Hughes momentarily rejects stability as he construes another one where the shape of colors, the conversations between one side next to another, is a painter’s voice in motion. You now have been captured, held in the painter’s eye and the severity between his/our viewing in harmony. The painter now dominates us.

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Schedule

from April 26, 2012 to May 26, 2012

Opening Reception on 2012-04-26 from 18:00 to 20:30

Artist(s)

Ian Hughes

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