Ronnie Hughes: Isobar

About

Hughes’ elegant and poised works are executed with complex technical skill yet retain a lightness of touch. While his finished paintings display a diversity of styles, at heart they share a common concern with the lived experience, and what Hughes has described as “the beauty, the fragility and the violence of being.” 

Ronnie Hughes’ works evolve over a long time and are generally process-driven to the extent that there is no plan or, in most cases, any sense of the outcome until the works are close to completion. “My role is to steer and nuance their evolution; to balance the elements and, just as often, to disrupt them resulting in the emergence of waves, nebulae, constellations, lattice structures and fields”.  

In recent years Hughes’ work has become more ‘optically’ charged, colour and shape are presented as vibrational energies where the haptic qualities that a painting’s surface contains and its ability to record, hold and represent time are amplified.

Hughes’ work is complex and multi-dimensional. The painted surface is constructed through a layering of stratas revealing a range of associative and representational qualities simultaneously. What appears to be random or chaotic is revealed to have a hidden template, structure or pattern, the regimented order of which is constantly gnawed at and undermined. 

“I’m interested in exposing these unseen forces, the things that lie beneath appearance. The physical act of making a painting is for me an act of discovery, a quest to extract a veiled or hidden reality. I try to make paintings that reward careful looking and that encourage contemplation”.