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.
