Untitled (Golden Yellow) Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 inches

Ian Hughes
October 9 – November 8, 2014

Over the arc of his career, Ian Hughes has honed a distinctive visual language in which paint reveals its lushest and most viscous qualities while simultaneously giving shape to bio-reminiscent forms that have a compelling life of their own. In Twisted Figures, his third solo show at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, Hughes’s latest series of acrylic paintings pushes this language into a new phase in which the shapes on the canvases continue to self-confidently assert their own presence, yet begin to move beyond an earlier, more matter-of-fact reliance on organic and visceral associations.

Twisted Figures reflects a subtle turn in Hughes’s paintings toward motifs that are slightly more elusive in content, while retaining the beautiful but vaguely stomach-churning core of his earlier works. Many of the latest pieces feature the same intense, warm palette and pseudo-anatomical imagery set against flat monochromatic backgrounds, such as Green Ovals, which presents a smooth fleshlike surface against which brightly rendered rolling forms in pink, white, and orange suggest intestines, buttocks, and/or reproductive organs. Yet patches of textile-like patterning and a handful of amorphous shapes scattered throughout hint at a much wider range of associations, from soft pillows to eerie but strangely inviting otherworldly landscapes.

In some of the new paintings, Hughes sets up a tension between more organic, down-to-earth colors—such as the duller hamburger/flesh pink in Untitled (Taupe) —and contorted masses that are much harder to pin down. Still other canvases veer in the opposite direction by merging undulations of vivid, carnivalesque blues, pinks, oranges, or greens with somber dark swathes into curves that evoke chaotic balloon sculptures or failed attempts to wring order from unruly sausages of brute matter. In Untitled (Golden Yellow) and Red Wrap, the brushstrokes begin to assert themselves in a way that seems to subtly threaten the integrity of the forms they comprise, thereby highlighting the importance of paint as the essential substrate for Hughes’s cheerful-yet-disquieting images. The juxtaposition of painterly effects (rounded forms and illusionistic volumes) with more graphic elements (flat, opaque backgrounds and sharp edges) strongly reinforces this message. The result is a potent comment on the powerful tension between medium and image that has haunted painting for as long as abstraction has existed, or perhaps since the first images were daubed on a cave wall millennia ago.

For further information, please contact 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel by phone at 1.917.701.3338, or by e-mail at info@532gallery.com

IAN HUGHES

APRIL 26 – MAY 26, 2012

Gallery 532 Thomas Jaeckel is pleased to present the paintings of Ian Hughes in his second one-man show at the gallery.
In this new body of work, Hughes brings to full fruition the investigation of color, space, and form that has been underway for nearly two decades. The new paintings continue to probe an artistic vein that runs from the eye to the brain and terminates in the viscera. The color field is repurposed as a visual staging area upon which organic forms, vascular and sinuous, shape-shift and commingle. The luminous color space of the background is simultaneously flat and volumetric, like a cloudless sky; it is a resolutely abstract space that asserts the two dimensional nature of painting and creates a dynamic contrast to the illusion of volume in the foreground.

In two related works, Yellow Curtain and Strands (Pink Curtain), the background color acts like a light box, illuminating the transparent forms from behind, analogous to an x-ray image. The reference to curtains has multiple meanings, most literally to the vertical strands hanging from the top and arranged across the picture plane like a beaded curtain (though admittedly, maybe more like flayed meat hanging on a drying rack.) But the transparency of the forms also suggests a diaphanous veil through which the viewer must pass to reach the other side, where lies another world–the world of metaphor and myth. Art historical references also abound, perhaps most poignantly to Morris Louis, whose name Hughes readily invokes as a source of inspiration.

Hughes’ technique is deceptively straightforward. Water is the medium; pigment dispersions and acrylic polymer yield color and form. Together they are poured, floated, and brushed onto the prepared surface; the dance between intent and accident, consciousness and unconsciousness, is set into motion. For Hughes, technique is purely a means to an end. Most important is the degree to which the technique serves the desire to create a state of visual and interpretive flux.

In this endeavor, Hughes aligns himself squarely within the tradition of painters like Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, whose groundbreaking ideas gave rise to a main branch of contemporary American abstraction which espouses the possibility of conveying the full range of human experience through the raw materials of paint and renders moot the distinction between abstraction and figuration.

Please contact the gallery for further information.

Ian Hughes

May 10 – June 7, 2010

532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel is pleased to present INSIDE OUT an exhibition of paintings by Ian Hughes, an outstanding mid-career painter, in his first one-person show in a New York gallery. Hughes’ paintings (here represented by large, medium and small scale works) re-examine and renew the always delicate relationship between color and form. Hughes’ forms are strangely suggestive, but of what exactly: primordial ooze, cell division run amok, fragments of the cosmos, a frozen oil spill, decay or growth, plant, animal, or human?  As the painted forms shift and mutate, so do the associations. Everything is in flux. A form is related, via color shifts, to an adjacent form, which itself is related to another, then another. This set of internal relationships causes the viewer’s eye to move about the canvas, picking out new ideas. Each interior form in a Hughes canvas can activate a different memory. Taken together, they can create a new universe of ideas for the viewer.