|
Patrick Hughes on La
Brea Escaperspective |
|
The library is an
infinite perspective, like the work and the city. Escaperspective is the one
promulgated very famously by Valéry (taking up the note from Mallarmé’s
“Sea Breeze”) in “The Graveyard by the Sea”, beyond
all this (constructs and collects of all and sundry kinds) is the river, or
the sea, or the hills.
There is, the book
considered infinite as well, Hughes’ own More on Oxymoron
(2004), deployed across the board as open pages facing, the sea between. The
text is indeterminate (viewed from a distance), the illustrations in black
and white convey, for instance, a trick wand.
The magic is a
continuing perspective in vertical and horizontal planes, generated by the
Agam construction of the surface. A raised vertical angle has representations
of Warhol (Elizabeth Taylor, Mao, Marilyn Monroe) painted as diminishing
perspectives (to the point), which two eyes convert into the walls of a
gallery, the multiple images of his work conveyed as a possession of the eye
(Ad Infinitum, 2004). Lichtenstein and Magritte (who has the
sign-painter’s hand here) are regaled with similar representations (The
Joy of Roy, Magrittes, both 2004). In Front of
the Back (2004) offers folded
canvases seen from the stretcher side, in the manner of the book. In
Memory of Marcel Marien (2000) is a more complex composition, involving a
cube in a corner that is a die, a window, a door, articulated walls. Observe the
progression of the work recently. Skye (2001) is a fine landscape,
refined still further in Arcadyllic (2005). Heather and mountains
rendered by application of true luster in stereoscopic vision, the eye
engaged by the foregrounds, aerial perspective, forced perspective,
Escaperspective. A ticklish fountain of painterly problems in backgrounds,
reduction of details, while becoming really more accurate, supplemented by
visual illusion, resolved.
These are the
articles of thought, rendered as perceptions, given freedom by the mind as
the result of the eyes’ deceitfulness brought to bear on a regular
application of irregularity oppositely placed by the painter in a row of
reversible angles as seaside tents (In Tents, 2005) in various colors,
striped, say. Keller &
Greene have The McGuffin (2004) in the front window, skyscrapers side
by side (rectangular prisms) with a landscape now visible. Seen from the
sidewalk, advancing toward the door, a pleasant appreciation after the
closing of Flowers West at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, where some of
the best works of the artist met with little favor, unaccountably, as if the
city were a backwater. Indeed, one small
part of the charm of these paintings is a clear, but incidental, style of
London appertaining to them. Clear and bright, not exacting or hard, fully
realized and yet agreeable to the mind’s eye. |
