Patrick Hughes, “The Newest Perspective”
by DeWitt Cheng
Scott Richards Contemporary Art, San Francisco, California
Exhibition continues through November 16, 2024
November 9, 2024
Patrick Hughes, "PatriCanaletto," 2024, oil and collage on board, 30 1/2 x 68 x 11". All images courtesy of Scott Richards Contemporary Art, San Francisco.
Students of art history may remember that the discovery of perspective was crucial to the development of realist painting in the Renaissance. At the time its effect 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 English painter Patrick Hughes similarly transported over the intricately constructed painting/sculpture hybrids that he has made for most of his six-decade career. His eye-fooling depictions of buildings and objects — ranging from Renaissance palazzi to contemporary art and art books — use perspectival devices and illusions to comment wittily on art and artists, representation and reality.
Hughes’ signature illusionism has as its point of origin the famous distorted anamorphic skull in Hans Holbein the Younger’s “The Ambassadors.” The skull is visible only obliquely, from a position to the left of and below the painting — the initial view from the stairway where it was originally hung. Then there are the theatrical forced-perspective cityscapes of columns and arcades by Palladio and Borromini in Venice and Rome, respectively.
Patrick Hughes, "Studio," 2023, handpainted multiple, 17 5/8 x 40 1/8 x 6 3/4".
Hughes was one of several young English artists who during the 1960s were attracted to Surrealism’s spirit of freedom, though not to its Romantic gloom. The absurdist humor of Ionesco and Magritte — Hughes’ favorite painter, according to the title of one painting — led the young artist from literature into art at the suggestion of a teacher. An early Magritte-influenced 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 an interior space, 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 overall flow are painted on planes that slope down toward the edges instead of upward like the sides of a box, at least as we optically interpret them.
Patrick Hughes, "Twentieth Century," 2018, oil and wood construction, 30 x 68 x 9".
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. According to Hughes, “I knew nothing about perspective … I was a fool who rushed in where angels fear to tread.”
Thirteen of the artists’ 2023-4 works, both eye-fooling and mind-bending, comprise “The Newest Perspective,” and represent the artist’s playfully Heraclitean philosophy that everything is in flux. As we slightly change our position, the buildings and objects (mostly stacks of books and artworks), with their hints of Giorgio di Chirico, expand or contract in a fascinating but slightly unnerving manner; move too far to the left or right, and entire portions of the subjects vanish while other shapes appear.
Patrick Hughes, "Books" and "Illhughesion," 2023, oil on board construction, 29 1/2 x 15 1/4 x 9".
The architectural constructions are made from archival MDF board, precisely cut to fit the detailed imagery, and joined to form pleated surfaces suggestive of folding screens or unfolded pamphlets, all of it set above the background plane of sky and land or sea. These homages to art, art museums, and the Renaissance architecture of Venice take the form of open-air museums without walls. “Patricanaletto” nods to Canaletto’s sumptuous views of the Pearl of the Adriatic, with faraway views of its famous churches framed by palaces seen edge-on, like ocean liners. Only when we move do the buildings shift and stretch in response to Hughes’ use of inverse perspective.
“Studio” presents an idealized painter’s workspace with the sheetrock walls common to studio buildings, an immense stack of art books, and red and yellow brushstrokes entering through the half-open door (a time-honored Surrealist device). “Twentieth Century,” “The Fourth Dimension,” and “Golden Gate” depict an art-lover’s paradise hung with various greatest hits of modernist art by Wayne Thiebaud, Max Ernst, Henri Matisse, Mark Rothko, Alexander Calder, Andy Warhol, Niki de Saint-Phalle, and so many others.
Patrick Hughes, "Brillo Pile," 2024, oil on board construction, 29 5/8 x 15 3/8 x 9".
Also included are Hughes’ cutout paintings on shaped board of stacks of books, sculptures, and various other artifacts that suggest the realistic but humorous Funk sculptures of Bay Area ceramists such as Robert Arneson. “Books” and “Illhughesion” present floating images of art books, including Hughes’s own “Paradoxymoron,” testifying to the artist’s research in art, aesthetics and perception. “Brillo Pile” takes as its subject the famous Warhol painted sculpture from the 1960s that raised so many questions about reality and representation, questions that remain unanswered to this day — and should remain so.
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 corporeal movement of the viewer. Reproductions, even the animated videos that the gallery helpfully provides online, cannot begin to capture their light-hearted and compelling magic.
