ANNA HUGHES
Waypoint
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OPENING: Saturday 25 February 2012 – H 6.00 pm
28 February 2012 – 14 April 2012
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Text by ANNA LONGO
Artericambi is pleased to present a solo exhibition by the artist Anna Hughes. In her paintings, this young British artist has often suggested a romantic imaginative world where the idyllic encounter with nature produces a feeling of uneasiness which, at the same time, attracts and warns us.
Anna Hughes’ paintings are familiar and evocative, the style recalls romantic painting where the beauty and immensity of nature opens up to a contradictory sense of the sublime. Even though we have the most sophisticated systems of provision, security and simulation at our disposal, we cannot prevent the emergence of primitive fears.
The Romantic attitude has been the object of a rationalistic and positivist repression, as faith in scientific and economical progress has made us forget our human limits. As Jean François Lyotard remarked, the sublime is not only a feeling coming from the encounter with nature, it also comes from the encounter with the technology that today seems to dominate our life. Today we have the impression that we are controlled by an immense machine that imposes its rhythms of production upon us. Like the robots that comes to life, examples of the Freudian uncanny, technology is confronting us with the otherness and familiar strangeness of our industry. That’s the point where we can situate Anna Hughes images. They are examples of the uncanny, familiar pictures producing an anxious feeling of strangeness.
Theses works tug at something which comes from the deepest part of unconscious. In the new body of work presented in this exhibition, the romantic style of Hughes’ painting is coupled with an acute anxiety. Threads are stitched into strict patterns on the canvas, across images of apolcalyptic looking clouds. The paint is thin, seeming to be stained into the fabric, the pale tones making an uncomforatble contrast with imagery. For the first time in her work, some canvasses have become stripped bare of imagery and take on a clean rationalized sythnthesis of her ideas in abstract form. The work grapples with a battle between the rational and emotional, the romantic and the apocalyptic, and a sense of everything being on the brink of collapse.
Titles such as ‘squadron’, ‘fallout’ and ‘lights out’ bring suggestions of war, while the stitched patterns draw assosiations with aircraft, spaceships, pixels, targets, stars, and waypoints.
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Anna Hughes, Installation view “Waypoint”, 2012
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Anna Hughes, And How Everything Had Nothing More to Lose, 2011 – Oil on linen, 11,8 x 13,7 inch
(LEFT) Anna Hughes, Fleet, 2012 – Yard on linen, 17,7 x 15,7 inch / (MIDDLE) Anna Hughes, Fallout, 2012 – Olio su lino, 27,5 x 19,6 inch / (RIGHT) Anna Hughes, Lights Out, 2012 – Oil on linen, 27,5 x 19,6 inch
(SINISTRA) Anna Hughes, Needle’s Eye, 2012 – Olio su lino, 40 x 45 cm / (DESTRA) Anna Hughes, Blindspot II, 2012 – Olio su lino, 15,7 x 17,7 inch
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