Patrick Hughes at Flowers West - Brief Article

Art in America, May, 2000 by David Ebony

Veteran British Pop artist Patrick Hughes is best known for meticulously rendered images of landscapes and interiors featuring optical tricks or what the artist refers to as "paradoxical perspectives." Inspired by de Chirico, Magritte and Duchamp (especially his Etant donnes), Hughes has been showing since the 1960s works in which incongruous architectural elements and punning illusionism defy all visual logic. In one of his best-known images, Leaning on a Landscape (1979), a stylized rainbow resting against a blue wall casts a dark shadow as if it were an opaque object. The first of Hughes's so-called sticking-out pictures, Sticking Out Room (1964), is a beveled relief in which a schematic interior seems to recede into the wall in spite of the fact that the surface it's painted on protrudes several inches outward.

The 15 recent oil-on-wood relief paintings in this exhibition, titled "The Movies," are elaborate and refined variations of the sticking-out pictures. In these works, which range from about 26 by 47 by 6 inches to 4 by 10 by 2 feet, Hughes uses a multipanel format in which an arrangement of identical rows of tall vertical wedges resembles an oversized accordion. The right-hand surface of each wedge is part of a single image, while the left-hand panels form a separate composite image. The artist refers to these pieces as "moving pictures," and they are interactive to a degree, since only viewers approaching the works from certain angles will notice that the images seem to move. Walking through the gallery, one senses that the landscapes appear to shift, and, perhaps most disconcertingly, objects seem to flip back and forth from foreground to background.

In Pleasure Island, for example, a tall yellow door seems to open, revealing a lush, tropical beach scene. While contemporary artists ranging from Lichtenstein to Agam have toyed with similar illusionistic devices, Hughes has taken the idea to an extreme. From a distance Hughes Henge appears to be a simple, stylized image of Stonehenge. On closer inspection, however, the image takes on a physical aspect, as if one were actually strolling among the ancient ruins. While Hughes's playful and ultra-slick experiments might be dismissed as mere sleight of hand, ultimately his work is a serious and provocative exploration of perception. [An exhibition of recent works by Patrick Hughes also appeared at Louis K. Meisel in New York, April 8-29.]