Hughes’ first solo show in Toronto in 10 years opens TONIGHT at Division Gallery. Our Sarah Letovsky brings you a sneak peek at this epic new body of work.
By: Sarah Letovsky
It’s with both a sincere and ironic nod to traditional Canadiana that Manitoban artist Simon Hughes presents his latest body of work, “The Central Region,” at Division Gallery. The show’s primary component is a series of large-scale watercolour paintings, a fact that’s incredibly hard to believe, given the painstaking accuracy and geometric precision that characterizes the work.
It’s immediately obvious that Hughes is working in a language defined by both early Modernism as well as Group of Seven legends like Lawren Harris, by abstracting the Canadian landscape into a series of shapes and flat colours. A broken-up patch of ice becomes a crowd of triangles; the aurora borealis transforms into a hanging chandelier of orderly geometric shards. Hughes’ work has always focused on our collective relationship to the landscape – but this is a marked departure from his more narrative scenes of condo-like log cabins and architectural structures interacting with human figures. In fact, a human presence is noticeably absent from this show – although we do see glimpses of civilization represented by cookie cutter houses and trucks spread out under the northern lights in works like Orange County, Alberta (2013), which Hughes mentions is inspired by the virus-like suburban sprawl he experienced in California. In this new work, Hughes turns the telescope around to experience the bigger picture, and the results are truly enchanting. The once outright narrative quality of his work has been subdued into subtle traces of human presence that produce a unique sense of (dis)quiet.
“The Central Region” feels both familiar and playfully experimental. In a somewhat tongue-in-cheek triptych, Red Studio (2013), Hughes presents us with a Matisse-like studio interior where a prototypical Canadian landscape painting hangs on the wall while a snowy urban landscape can be seen through the studio window. This contrast not only highlights a growing tension between the urban and the natural, but also makes a subtle comment about our changing relationship to (and perhaps fetishization of) traditional Canadian iconography.
While the show does, in many ways, question our own fascination with a landscape that we may or may not experience in a genuine way, and even goes so far as to imply that the landscape itself is changing because of our own encroachment – it also pays homage to the pure aesthetic pleasure to be found in nature, with iridescent dancing colours, sensitive gradients, and seductive geometric surfaces.
“The Central Region” is on view at Division Gallery from February 27–April 5, 2014
Sarah Letovsky is a Toronto-based artist, writer, and arts administrator.
SOURCE: Art Bitch | Toronto art review and blog – Read entire story here.
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