Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh until November 20
3 stars
Music and movement are at the heart of this showing of eight works by the Borders based artist to mark his sixtieth birthday. Identical in scale and scope, each canvas painstakingly maps out an interlocking network of coloured brick-shaped grids that at first glance dance about their large-scale square surface in busy but constant motion, like some cartoon traffic jam piled up on some multiple-lane freeway and slowly honking its way home.
With only one painting made a year, at first casual glance there’s little to gauge between them, but in actual fact, where the two earliest works, ‘Untitled (I),’ dating from 1988, and ‘Untitled (II)’ are pale and interesting, the more ‘recent’ pieces, ‘Untitled (XIII)’ through to ‘Untitled (XVIII)’ are bolder and blarier in tone.
If such a willfully restricted palette resembles the pictorially suggestive scores of avant-garde composers, it’s deliberate, and possesses the sort of spacey aspiration for Zen-like calm that one can imagine Brian Eno attempting to co-opt. Where Eno’s video paintings have a slowly morphing fluidity, however, there’s a quietly insistent solidity to Hugonin’s works that, when lined up together, provide strength and substance rather than aural wallpaper.
To compliment the show, on November 16th, cellist Peter Gregson will play a programme of work in response to Hugonin’s paintings. In what seems to continue the current slow-burning minimalist takeover across Scotland, works by Morton Feldman, Philip Glass and Steve Reich will feature. In Hugonin’s world, at least, it’s hip to be square.
The List, October 2010
ends
3 stars
Music and movement are at the heart of this showing of eight works by the Borders based artist to mark his sixtieth birthday. Identical in scale and scope, each canvas painstakingly maps out an interlocking network of coloured brick-shaped grids that at first glance dance about their large-scale square surface in busy but constant motion, like some cartoon traffic jam piled up on some multiple-lane freeway and slowly honking its way home.
With only one painting made a year, at first casual glance there’s little to gauge between them, but in actual fact, where the two earliest works, ‘Untitled (I),’ dating from 1988, and ‘Untitled (II)’ are pale and interesting, the more ‘recent’ pieces, ‘Untitled (XIII)’ through to ‘Untitled (XVIII)’ are bolder and blarier in tone.
If such a willfully restricted palette resembles the pictorially suggestive scores of avant-garde composers, it’s deliberate, and possesses the sort of spacey aspiration for Zen-like calm that one can imagine Brian Eno attempting to co-opt. Where Eno’s video paintings have a slowly morphing fluidity, however, there’s a quietly insistent solidity to Hugonin’s works that, when lined up together, provide strength and substance rather than aural wallpaper.
To compliment the show, on November 16th, cellist Peter Gregson will play a programme of work in response to Hugonin’s paintings. In what seems to continue the current slow-burning minimalist takeover across Scotland, works by Morton Feldman, Philip Glass and Steve Reich will feature. In Hugonin’s world, at least, it’s hip to be square.
The List, October 2010
ends
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