Arcadia Christopher McHugh 7 MAY - 22 MAY 2016
ST ANNE’S GALLERIES
ARCADIA: A DANGEROUS BEAUTY - PAINTINGS BY CHRISTOPHER MCHUGH Michael Szpakowski describes these paintings as dangerously beautiful and flags up an underlying ambition of this exhibition. They may look like colourful landscapes but remember Tom Stoppard’s admonition from Squaring the Circle: everything is true except the words and the pictures. Danger may indeed lie in a beauty that threatens to reveal the truth beneath appearances - and that, however hard the search, is what I’m after…. Christopher McHugh Beauty has had a chequered history in recent discourse about art. For a long time it was definitely out, then, for a little while, a word not even to be whispered. Recently it has made a cautious return, but tamed, corralled, explained and contextualised by the theory gatekeepers. Safe. I want to say: these works of Christopher McHugh are dangerously beautiful. I look at them and I feel— yes I do—a lump in my throat. I feel actually, not metaphorically, as if something trembles in the region of my heart. My mind, too, races away. I know, also, that I will always remember the nature, the shape of this experience of looking. I am marked, changed. And then I want to say—the feeling these paintings give me is something I have in common with other human beings—it’s the same thing that happens to people when they look at a favoured and finely worked ornament, an overworked photo of a sunset, or when I tenderly recall a favourite illustration from a children’s book I once loved. We have to trust ordinary language this far. And that feeling, it seems to me, stems from how we are all embodied in the world and how, when we look at something beautiful, it affirms for us, enables us to consider and to celebrate, the joy of that embodiment,
PORTRAIT BY ALUN CALLENDER
pulse and sight and breath and touch, that feeling of at-homeness and delight we’re sometimes privileged to feel. But there is more. I want to insist that what McHugh has made here is better by far, more worthy of our sustained attention, than ornament, sunset photo or book illustration and this difference is to do with labour, common to all these things for sure, but here a particularly intense and all-consuming labour of looking, thinking, feeling and making, self-imposed and unforgiving and which demands that one return, return and return again to either single work or series until the voice inside (and that voice only) says now it is OK to step away and stop. World-transforming labour, delight in that world, key elements of being human, distilled and gifted to us, here and now, in these magnificent works, in these pigments suspended in oil and pushed around on cloth. Take good time to look at them, to be marked and to be changed by them.
Michael Szpakowski, 2016 Michael Szpakowski is an artist, composer & writer. Michael’s work has been performed/exhibited around the world. He recently published a meditation on a single painting by Christopher in Turps Banana.
THE WORLD IN THE DUDE’S BACKYARD oil on canvas 51 x 76 cm
FICTION TREE; THE MATCHAM VERSION oil on hessian 90 x 90 cm
THE KINK IN GREEN LANE (TOP)
THE TREE IN FRAME
THE CREPUSCULAR TREE (TOP)
THE TREE IN CONTEXT II
oil on canvas 40 x 40 cm
oil on canvas 30 x 30 cm
oil on canvas 30 x 30 cm
oil on canvas 30 x 30 cm
CAMILLES’S RECOLLECTED LANDSCAPE oil on canvas 23 x 31.5 cm
FALL (METONYMIC) oil on canvas 23 x 29 cm
THE TENACIOUS TREE (TOP) oil on canvas 40.5 x 51 cm
CONVERSATION PIECE: SENSE & MEMORY oil on canvas 20.5 x 25.5 cm
THE LACHRYMOSE TREE (TOP) oil on canvas 40.5 x 51 cm
CONVERSATION PIECE: TWO PRINCIPALS oil on canvas 20.5 x 25.5 cm
THE STANDS BY THE GOYLE oil on canvas 61.5 x 91.5 cm
PARABLE TREE: THE LEGEND OF MARTHA & MARY oil on hessian 90 x 90 cm
MARLENE’S MEMENTO TREE oil on wood 76 x 102 cm
THE YELLOW FIELDS TREE oil on canvas 23 x 30.5 cm
GRISELDA’S GARDEN GAMBIT oil on canvas 40 x 40 cm
FROM THE ARTIST’S SKETCHBOOK Not for sale
CHRISTOPHER MCHUGH Born in 1959 Education Stafford College of Ar t , Bath Academy of Ar t, Manchester Metropolitan University and University of Sussex Senior Lecturer in Fine Ar t at the University of Chichester Member, Steering Groups for Teaching Painting and the National Association for Fine Ar t Educators
SELECTED SOLO SHOWS Horizons, Life Sciences, University of Sussex Exegesis, The Otter Gallery, Chichester Paintings St Richard’s Hospital, Chichester Chimerae, HQ Gallery, Lewes, Sussex Emporion, The Art Space, West Stoke House, Sussex Wide Horizons, the Sussex Institute Paintings William Morris Inc., London Landscapes, Adcore Strategy UK, London A Walkabout, Up the Hill Gallery, Brighton Horizons, Mitre Gallery, Chichester Ring-a-Ring-a-Roses, house installation, Brighton Eikones, Red Herring Gallery, Brighton SELECTED SOLO SHOWS Liminal, The Otter Gallery, Chichester The Margins of the Lane, The Otter Gallery, Chichester Entrance to a Lane, Group exhibition and Symposium, Otter Gallery, Chichester Los Angeles, with Frank McHugh, St Anne’s Galleries, Lewes, Ark, University of Sussex From the Artist’s Studio, St Anne’s Galleries, Lewes, Sussex Sounding the Site, interdisciplinary arts event, University of Sussex Quentin Follies, Charleston Farmhouse, Glynde Intervention, Worthing Museum Both Sides, North Bishop Exhibition Space, Dallas, Texas, U.S.A. Quentin Follies, Charleston Farmhouse, Glynde The Big Draw, live drawing event, Fabrica Gallery, Brigthon Vestige, Otter Gallery, Chichester L’Artichaut Gallery, Chichester North Transept, Chichester Cathedral Journey and Memory, Sussex Open, Brighton Museum Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne The Odd Couple, Arts Council Media Conference, Corn Exchange, Brighton Land and Sea, Sussex Open, Brighton Museum The Library of Babel, Brighton Festival Everybody’s by Artonic, Spectacolor Board, Piccadilly Circus, London Read My Lips, Artonic, Wellesley House, Brighton Hand to Hand, UK, Czechoslovakia and U.S.A. Objects of Desire, Artonic, Piccadilly Circus, London (with Art Angel Trust)
THE PROUD TREE oil on canvas 23 x 30.5 cm (detail)
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