Bastard Blue
Volta Art Fair
Metropolitan Pavilion
125 West 18th Street
Manhattan
New York
May 17-21, 2023.
PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release
Bringing Hughes’ work to New York will be the Stone Step Gallery from Dublin. A modest gallery, they pack a punch when you look at the caliber of international artists they represent.
Hughes, known for his unconventional approach to life, has an unusual backstory – a university soccer scholarship recipient, a former League of Ireland captain, and a player on the Irish Universities soccer team that won a World Cup in Mexico. He then went on to co-found a legendary multi-Cannes winning Dublin ‘punk’ advertising agency, that repositioned Ireland as a major creative force on the global stage.
Out of public view during this time, Hughes was quietly painting in his studio, an old pig barn in Blackrock, a coastal village on the outskirts of Dublin – establishing himself as a notable contemporary artist attracting collectors across Europe and Asia.
Hughes’ work is a fusion of the post-World War Two, New York city abstraction art movement and his own unique physically expressive technique. He works frenetically with canvasses strewn across the studio floor, applying layer upon layer of paint to the surface, focusing only on rhythm and momentum, as the painting slowly reveals itself. He draws his energy from the ferocious natural environment surrounding him. His raw uncontrolled marks and brush strokes drive the composition to the canvas edge and beyond.
The series, debuting at Volta, will showcase his latest work titled “Bastard Blue”, a thought-provoking investigation of the color blue, and it’s complex emotions. Hughes’ aversion towards the color, entwined with his love-hate relationship with it, ultimately culminated in the creation of this series, which showcases his journey of embracing it.
By painting with the color he once feared, Hughes found a new respect and understanding for it, which is beautifully captured in his works. Inspired by the savage and intense beauty of the southern coast of Kerry, the series captures the paradoxical essence of the region’s fierce yet vulnerable skies, seas, and lands.
His work invites the viewer to live in the climatic atmosphere created by his paintings, the illusion, the play of light at the edge of the earth, beyond borders even beyond realms.
With an ever growing international reputation, and following multiple successful shows, including London, Hong Kong and Dublin, Hughes’ debut at Volta New York promises to be an exciting new chapter in his career.
For more information:
info@voltashow.com
maureen@stonestepgallery.com
www.stonestepgallery.com
Bastard Blue. A review.
‘I remember as a young man making my maiden excursion to New York and seeing for the first time Ad Reinhardt’s Black Paintings from the early sixties in MoMA. I had only known them from illustration and, as I gave them the optical time they required, that pre-conceived notion of their monochrome nature dissolved into a delight of geometry and colour, deep resonant blues and reds, masked initially by the anatomical mechanics of vision.
Giving time to painting, especially abstract painting, in this the age of images is a big ask. One must be self-aware that certain subtleties of tonal colour can only reveal themselves when the retina is afforded the time to adjust its cones and rods to perceive their qualities. And so it is with this suite of paintings by Paul Hughes.
The investment of this optical capital pays back in spades when viewing Hughes work from this series. Every part of the picture surface is blue. The blacks are blue, the whites are blue and the blues are a myriad shades of blue. And arising from these waves of blue a furtive topography seems to suggest itself. Not a static depiction of place but stacked layers of perceptions as if seeing simultaneously through the atmospherics of ‘the night, the light and the half-light’. We glimpse sea, headland, sky, on top of headland, sky and sea. And then the dynamism of the painting rolls over and we returned to joyous abstraction before the process repeats and we are peering into the blue night of place again.
The experiential nature of these paintings are strengthened by their square format. A horizonal canvas would play to the tropes of landscape and foul their mercurial qualities. The square subverts such associations and indicates to the viewer the painting is a place in itself, a place to abide and perceive.’
Patrick T Murphy
Patrick T Murphy is Director of the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts, Dublin, Ireland.
Prior to that position he was Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, USA.