CHRISTOPHER MCHUGH: HORIZONALIA

Christopher McHugh Horizonalia A celebration of the skyline in paint 1 - 30 June 2019

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Between ‘this’ and ‘that’ lies painting.

The world is endlessly complex, endlessly fascinating. It seems to me that our knowledge of it is about the relation between things …. and it seems to me the painter’s job is to explore and report on that marvel.

In Horizonalia I want to show some of the more recent developments in the long-running series of work that I started out entitling The Wide Horizon. Paintings from The Wide Horizon have gone down different avenues, exploring and elaborating the nature and function of painting - how it exists in the interaction between pictorial ‘memes’ and STUFF, processed. They operate on an underlying notion:

The horizon exists as a dividing line between earth and sky, above and below, all around us. We use it to organise what we see - a spine by which to orientate the myriad glimpses that make up our visual knowledge of the world. Under the generic title The Wide Horizon, these works, as explorative, partial projects, have utilised materials from the landscape (wood, stone, tin cans ....) as substrates for images. When displayed they operate on the viewer’s understanding of space by re-convening a sense of the encircling skyline.

(Notes for Testbed, The Otter Gallery)

There have been several expeditions along The Wide Horizon over the years and more recently the paintings have taken on a more daring hue and a more extravagant imagination. Like most of my work, these paintings are not descriptive pictures of specific views or particular places. They are inventions that both call upon/display/subvert the conventions of painting that live in our consciousness and shape our ‘ways of seeing’…. and a flavour of how we experience things. I hope they evoke, provoke and stimulate (memories, visual sensibilities and the sense of that dream state where the kaleidoscope of experience is processed into meaning). The world is endlessly rich and mysterious…. and I want these paintings to be a celebration of the ubiquitous skyline around us and the lability of paint…. and to be experiences in their own right - experiences that work their way into that corner of your awareness where place, appearance and feeling collide and resonate with your sense of ‘being in the world’.

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Christopher McHugh April 2019

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Christopher McHugh trained in Painting at Bath Academy of Art and Manchester Polytechnic (now Manchester School of Art). He has spent his life since painting, teaching, curating (founding Director of Fabrica Gallery), writing and working on artists’ collaborations (such as the 33 year-long artists’ cooperative Red Herring Studios in Brighton & Hove). His commitment to painting, however, has been unwavering with an obsessive interest in the relationship between medium, colour, reference and metaphor. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Chichester and a member of the Steering Committees of the National Asssociation for Fine Art Educators and Teaching Painting.

Christopher McHugh, Burrow Mump, The Levels, Somerset (photograph: Sophia Lovell Smith)

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Elm Horizons Human consciousness is an embodied consciousness …. ‘I am what is around me,’ Wallace Stevens argues…. ‘I am my world,’ Ludwig Wittgenstein concludes.

Juhani Pallasmaa, The Thinking Hand, 2009, 013

(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP) Elm Horizon: Index, oil on wood, 38x105cm Elm Horizon: Motley Down, oil on wood, 27x59cm Fragment Horizon: Fields, oil on wood, 30x50cm

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Elm Horizon: Nacreous, oil on wood, 35x65cm

The painter speaks of relationships; a tender mark, a violent gesture ‌. This is the timeless language of desire and connectedness. It knows no allegiance to external ideologies, it respects no brief or labels, finding sufficient wonder in the ground at your feet and the stain, smudge and clotted drag of pigment on surface.

Matthew Burrows, Introduction for Between Things exhibition, Otter Gallery, University of Chichester

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The Wide Horizon The austere simplicity of the overall layout [Wide Horizon (Land and Sea) 3] – which constrains that frantically rich colour, suggests perhaps the prehistory of the earth – the explosive colours of lava flow, of waters as yet to yield life, of a young landscape in the process of formation and, yet that, soberingly, could equally be an intimation of a very old landscape, one in its dotage.

Michael Szpakowski, A Painting by Christopher McHugh, Turps Banana, Issue #15

Land Sea Sky, oil on wood, 28x72cm (including frame)

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Evening Horizon: Crepuscular, oil on wood, 23x54cm (including frame) Gold Horizon I, oil on wood, 26x50cm (including frame) Thick Horizon: Landschaf, oil on wood, 25x46cm (including frame)

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Cameo Horizons ... diverse as they are in their imaginative flavours - his work provides us with a kind of distillation‌. This is how a world comes into being, each seems to say; this is how objects might blossom from chaos.

Julian Bell, catalogue foreword for Christopher McHugh exhibition Chimerae, HQ Gallery

Cameo Horizon: Nip, oil on wood, 13x20cm

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(Clockwise from top left) Cameo Horizon: Screen, oil on wood, 10x22cm; Cameo Horizon: Stacking, oil on wood 14x21cm; Cameo Horizon: The D & the DBS, oil on wood, 8x18cm; Cameo Horizon: Red Step, oil on wood, 17x36cm; Cameo Horizon: Crooning, oil on wood, 11x18cm; CAMEO HORIZON: RIM, oil on wood, 15x20cm

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Marginal Horizons …. not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being…. Like art, the act of bringing truth into being…. By reason of the same kind of attentiveness and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same will to seize the meaning of the world …. as that meaning comes into being.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 2002, xxii - xxiv

Clotted Horizon I: Vista, mixed media on wood, 13x152cm Lowland Horizon: Fenceline, mixed media on wood, 20x120cm

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(TOP) Vista, mixed media on wood, 25x107cm

Heartfelt ‘Thanks’ to all those who have made this work and exhibition possible, especially Michael, Charlie and all at St Anne’s, the writers whose words I have borrowed, Leigh Simpson for photography, Terry Howe for image editing…. and always Sophia for endless support

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St Anne’s GALLERies REPRESENTING SUSSEX ARTISTS

111 High Street, Lewes, East Sussex BN7 1XY mobile. 07860 728220 michael@michaelbell.co.uk www.stannesgalleries.com COVER IMAGE: HOT HorIzon: (CABO DE GATA) PART I, oil on CANVAS, 30x95cm

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