Patrick Hughes "The Newest Perspective" at Scott Richards Contemporary, San Francisco

PATRICK HUGHES: The Newest Perspective
Scott Richards Contemporary Art

Students of art history may remember that the discovery of perspective was crucial  to the development of realist painting in the Renaissance, and was deemed almost miraculous. The Florentine painter, Paolo Uccello, lost himself in ecstasies over the geometry of space, exclaiming from his studio, late at night (according to his long-suffering wife) “Che bella cosa e la perspettiva!”

It is easy to imagine the English painter Patrick Hughes similarly obsessed and delighted over the constructed painting/sculpture hybrids that he has made for most of his six-decade career, eye-fooling depictions of buildings and objects—both Renaissance palazzi and contemporary art and art books—that use perspective devices and illusions to comment wittily on art and artists, representation and reality. The distorted anamorphic skull in Holbein’s “The Ambassadors,” visible only obliquely from a position to the left of and below the painting, from the stairway where it was originally hung, is a famous example. So are the theatrical forced-perspective cityscapes of columns and arcades by Palladio and Borromini in Vicenza and Rome, respectively.

Hughes was one of several young English artists in the 1960s who were attracted to Surrealism’s spirit of freedom, though not to its Romantic doom and gloom. The absurdist humor of Ionesco and Magritte—his favorite painter, according to the title of one painting—led Hughes from literature into art, at a teacher’s suggestion. An early Magrittean painting, “Brick and Sky” (1965) depicts a blue sky with a few wispy clouds, punctured by a jagged hole; just below the shattered sheetrock crater lies a brick wall, as if a house had capsized. A 1964 work, “Sticking-Out Room,” depicts a room, emptied of furnishings, that might have housed one of Magritte’s giant apples or roses; with its vanishing point located squarely at the center of the panel, it resembles a stage set, or a Flemish Madonna’s bedroom, but the receding side walls, ceiling and flow are all painted on planes that slope down toward the edges instead of upward like the sides of a box, as we optically interpret them. The depiction of receding planes on protruding ones—i.e., the contradiction between the conceptual and the perceptual—is the operant principle of Hughes’ ‘reverspective’ work since 1989, when he returned to space-bending illusionism. Hughes: I knew nothing about perspective… I was a fool who rushed in where angels fear to tread.”

Thirteen of Hughes’ 2023-4 trompe-l’oeil/trompe-l’esprit works, both eye-fooling and mind-bending, comprise The New Perspective, and represent the artist’s playfully Heraclitean philosophy that everything changes. As the viewer slightly changes his position the classic-architecture buildings and objects (mostly stacks of books and artworks) with their hints of di Chrico expand or contract in a fascinating but slightly unnerving manner; move to far to the left or right, and entire portions of the subjects vanish, and other shapes spring up, like Holbein’s symbolic skull.

Also on view are Hughes’ cutout paintings on shaped board (a format which the artist explored as an undergraduate) of stacks of books and sculptures and various artifacts that may suggest the realistic but humorous Funk sculptures of Bay Area ceramists. “Books” and “Illhughesion” present floating images of art books, including Hughes’s own Paradoxymoron, testifying to the artist’s researches in art, aesthetics and perception. “Brillo Pile” takes as its subject the famous Andy Warhol painted sculpture from the 1960s that raised so many questions about reality and representation, questions that remain definitively unanswered to this day—and will probably remain so.

Patrick Hughes has written, “Reverspectives give you air to breathe and a dance of life to pursue.” They absolutely must be seen in real, ‘breathing’ space, and brought to life by the viewer; reproductions alone, even the ‘animated’ videos that the gallery helpfully provides online, cannot capture their light-hearted and compelling magic.



The Poetry of Wood: Alex Garcia and Catherine Mackey
Tint Gallery


In the early twentieth century, with the advent of Cubism and Dadaism, nontraditional materials—that is, vernacular and even perishable materials, usually considered as inherently worthless—began to invade modernist art. The illusionist depiction of reality, mastered over almost five centuries, was superseded by a new vision of art: one more experimental in form and feeling, and more challenging to the viewer, who was asked to interpret collages and constructions made of humble materials lacking the ‘noble’ glamor of bronze, marble and oil paint.

The Poetry of Wood brings together eleven wall-mounted assemblages by Alex Garcia and twelve drawings and paintings by Catherine Mackey. Both San Francisco artists have architectural training and share a contemporary recycle/reuse/repurpose ethic, and each explores wood as motif and material, revealing the hidden poetry of old buildings; they are visual archaeologists or paleontologists.

Mackey juxtaposes her views of weathered barns—some realistic, others more expressionist—with swatches of collaged text from tattered old street posters, imagining their lost glory days; the effect is reminiscent of the words emerging from Cubist and Futurist paintings depicting the sensory overload of modern life (circa 1915).   “Lemmon Canyon-Weathered Grays” and “Pasquetti—Aged Ochres” are oil-on-panel portraits of dilapidated barns,  stable triangular structures despite their missing planks, depicted in elevation view, straight-on and  sideways, from a distance, in the Bernd and Hilla Becher style, but with the bright color accents from the collaged text elements lending a contrasting festive note. More dramatic are the two “Vishi Barn Collapse” works on paper, with their impenetrable gray-brown tangles of beams, posts and planks suggesting shipwreck, explosion, or implosion. More abstract are the colorful squashed buildings in “Beautiful Annihilation” (the creative destruction of the economists) and “Sinking into a Soft Caul of Forgetfulness,” its title adapted from Sylvia Plath’s poem on the onset of sleep and winter, “Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond.”  

Garcia salvages fragments from collapsing ranch buildings in West Marin into elegant, semi-abstract constructions that will live on, sheltered, indoors, in viewers’ imaginations—perhaps accompanied by the reclaimed-wood furniture that the artist has made for twenty years. While some the wall-mounted sculptures retain their original rectangular shapes, though carved by the artist, others suggest pictures and narratives (albeit mysterious, playful ones, as in Klee, Kandinsky and Ernst). “Emancipation” is a small wooden panel to which steel rods have been affixed, suggesting a teepee tripod rising from the black arc of the earth into a vivid deep pink sky; a handful of rungs spanning two of the poles suggests a rickety ladder and a short-lived freedom. “That Tree on the Hill” is a spindly array of metal rods that suggests only the most nominal of trees—or old television aerials. “Tale of a Whale” is an assemblage composed of two weathered boards, one suggesting a stylized whale, and the other a ship (or the whale’s lower jaw), with the pieces connected by metal rods that read as teeth or harpoons in this fish story. “Orbiting the Green Planet” and “Arrival” are evocative small abstract landscapes (made with the assistance of the late Beto Toscano) composed of a various textures and colors of found wood—counterpane countries for tiny denizens.

Mackey’s expressionist architectural views and Garcia’s intuitive, elegant fabrications (in both senses of the word) are complementary, and well paired: a vanishing past and an imaginary future are caught and preserved in, by, and for the evanescent present.

—DEWITT CHENG


Rico Solinas' "You Never Know" at Anglim Trimble Gallery, San Francisco (from 48Hills.org)



Rico Solinas's Paintings Depict Bay Area with Affection and Humor

RICO SOLINAS: You Never Know
Anglim/Trimble Gallery
March 2-April 27, 2024

Rico Solinas, an Oakland artist who lives in the Mission, is the subject of a You Never Know, mini-retrospective at Anglim/Trimble Gallery,. While the hundred or so paintings, treating a number of subjects, fill the gallery, it must be said that even this embarrassment of riches is but a tiny sampling of Solinas’s prodigious oeuvre of hundreds of notebooks and tens of thousands of paintings. As Senior Preparator at the San Francisco Museum of Art, the artist skips lunches and breaks, opting instead to document the generally unseen labors of his art-wrangler colleagues. He has also worked closely with and learned from some of the world-famous artists circulating through SFMOMA. He told an interviewer, “I’ve worked with a lot of artists in this job, and you pick up a lot of good tips. One of them is ‘Paint every day.’ ”

Painting is a synthesis of focused observation—the Surrealist painter Max Ernst claimed his favorite activity was seeing—and painterly improvisation. The wide-ranging subject matter in this show, which covers almost thirty-five years’ practice, reflects Solinas’s interest in daily life—“I paint what I see,” as the mordant cartoonist Gahan Wilson once joked— filtered through an sensibility both respectful and playful.

In the late 1980s, Solinas, then in his middle thirties, began a series of landscape paintings on the unusual substrate of antique handsaws. This was partly a tribute to his recently deceased grandfather, a carpenter whom Solinas’ s artist mother had herself honored by painting on his circular saw blades to make gifts for her children. The handsaw paintings now displayed  throughout the gallery depict trucks, piping, and industrial machinery, in an homage to manual labor—which includes art making. It is easy, in the resurgence of the labor movement in recent years, to see the series as sharing the celebratory spirit of the working-man art of the Depression and early 1940s. Solinas later expanded the series, now containing hundreds of saws, to depict the art museums that he visited (and worked in) in the United States and Europe, including SFMOMA and other Bay Area institutions, in the aptly named series,100 Museums: Paintings of Buildings That Have Paintings Inside.

In 1990, Solinas  painted a series of carefully observed portraits of the naval ships docked at Hunters Point (a WWII Navy base now housing artist studios), setting them in heaving, theatrical seas. The long rectangular paintings on panel , marine typology, resemble the ship paintings adorning boys’ plastic model kits, and their oddly skewed horizon lines, which the installation plays up by installing some of the thirteen works at odd angles, exude a storm-tossed vibe, as if the works had been hung on rotating gimbals, never to spill their contents no matter how buffeted, in true ship shape. Across the gallery hangs Solinas’s 1991 painting, “151Third Street,” depicting the jumbled skyline of the downtown neighborhood that four years later would house the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,. The painted skyline is oddly canted at about 7 degrees to the left, similar to those ubiquitous  photos of San Francisco’s hilly streets with the streets aligned with the bottom of the picture margin and the lined-up houses apparently tilted askew; the gallery has humorously installed the painting tilted so that the buildings look plumb (as we know most of them to be)..

Later in the 1990s, came a series of tondo (circular-format) works depicting windblown trees and commercial signage motifs from our urban infrastructure. Instead of painting from photos, Solinas painted these twenty-four works on-site, with his back to the motifs, working from a convex mirror attached to his easel, providing a wide-angle peephole distortion. This absurdist shoot-over-the-shoulder Annie-Oakley approach, with its resultant backward-reading looking-glass messages, remakes Pop Art motifs from ‘vulgar’ contemporary life with engaging wit and humor.

FInally, in 2020, with the advent of the covid pandemic, Solinas began a series of small plein-air (outdoor) gouache (opaque watercolor) paintings on paper, documenting the street life of the Bayview District, in southeast San Francisco. If the predominantly minority Bayview is regarded with trepidation by the cautious, Solinas’s corrective views of la vie bohémienne, which have gained a wide audience on Instagram and Facebook (where I first saw them), betray neither angst nor indignation over social injustice. The Bayiew’s denizens are carefully observed,, but Solinas eschews photographic realism in favor of cheerful distortion. He depicts not individual people so much as characters in a scene, as if onstage, performing in, say, a music or opera. Again, the depictions of working-class life by sympathetic Depression artists come to mind. Solinas: “A couple figures, a couple buildings… I just want to capture everyday places that people go to.” The Bayview, a book with sixty-seven of these friendly paintings inside, so to speak, has just been published.



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