Patrick Hughes
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The well-crafted works of Patrick Hughes, which he makes from wood using a ruler and glue and then painting them, are another matter. Like many paintings that rely on trompe l’oeil techniques, they comment on reality and perception. Trompe l’oeil is not what distinguishes these works, however. Rather than trick our eyes, they trick our entire bodies. And where trompe l’oeil requires the viewer to participate in the trickery, these paintings baffle anybody who passes within a certain radius. The deception doesn’t just last an eye-watering minute or two; it is unshakable, even after the methods of its creation are revealed and its effects explained. This London artist has invented a technique that as far as I know has no precedent.
The effect of his paintings is as difficult to explain as it is obvious when one of them is in front of you. (It doesn’t work in photographs either, so anyone reading this review is going to have to trust me or see for themselves.) In brief, they depict landscapes and interiors formed by straight lines: book-lined parlors, city streets, or mazes. Hughes paints them on wooden planes glued at angles that duplicate the adjustments for perspective that the eye makes naturally when viewing a scene of this kind. But the edges that should protrude are in fact recessed. Stand still, and the pictures painted on these corrugated structures make perfect sense; approach them, bend your knees, or even swivel your head, and they do strange, fun-house-like things with your senses of space and balance. They’re experienced more as rides than as paintings. No artist, not M.C. Escher with his impossible staircases nor Piranesi with his gossamer etchings of fantastic dungeons, can make you as dizzy as Patrick Hughes–as opposed to Magic Eye, which just made you nauseous.
