(selected by Chris Evans)
Love Seat, 2005
'Hughes doesn't need to touch the walls to evoke an image of abandonment and decay; his sculptures, which often represent neglected furniture and other apparently worthless objects that have had contact with bodies, charge the entire space they're in'. (1)
Richard Hughes' practice reflects the more prosaic aspects of urban existence, using a combination of found and man-made objects. His preoccupation with urban environments and the subcultures existing therein is articulated through objects that are re-made to resemble familiar, discarded objects, yet transformed to make something unexpected and spectacular from the everyday. Hughes' adaptations and methods of dublication, casting new objects from the detritus of urban life engage the viewer to see not only the copy of the found object, but an object aspires to change the way we perceive.
The works are hand-made simulacra and propose a revised version of the original. In some works he uses a close to photo-realistic depiction of the object, in others the reproductive process has distorted the object creating an inexact copy of the original. Hughes' engagement with both the material substance of found objects and their site or location includes using the surrounding environment itself as material within the work. Transferring this to the exhibition site, he often alters the gallery space to create the illusion of ageing paintwork, or wallpaper peeling away from the walls. The viewer is challenged to assemble the image piece by piece through a process of visual recognition and personal associations. (2)
Alex Farquharson positions Richard Hughes within a 'lineage of simulationist sculptors that harks back to the beginnings of Pop (Claes Oldenburg especially) but whose most emblematic exponent is Robert Gober, an artist who typically focuses on the ubiquitous (newspapers, kitchen and bathroom ware, candles, etc.), the better to maximise the uncanniness of his feats of desublimation'. (2) He continues, 'Hughes' sculptures take you somewhere you've been before and whose specificity is undeniable. This sense of deja vu is compounded by the more the environment of ones formative years resembles the artist's own: the southern hinterland of the West Midlands of the 1980s. Hughes' melancholy and monstrous objects suggest this particular locus: somewhere on a limb, cut adrift from a distinctive metropolitan identity (being neither London nor the North), on the margins (neither urban, rural nor, even, suburban), at a time when social and political idealism was at its lowest ebb (the years of Conservative rule). Hughes' sculptures are trophies to these times, recalling awkward episodes we may not wish to revisit, but which their wit and virtuosity might help us overcome'. (3)
These powerful sculptures combine meticulous attention to detail with a slacker aesthetic, taking the source material and means to produce his work from the most banal of urban environments: his material is the flotsam that ends up in the urban hinterland: discarded plastic bags, bicycle tyres and old clothes. He creates facsimiles of these objects, painstakingly carved, cast, moulded or modelled: ''Roadsider' (2003), is a facsimile in resin of a plastic bottle thats been pissed in. Placed in a corner, the diminutive object precipitates a narrative of human presence: an otherwise spartan room takes on the sense of having been occupied by someone less house-trained. More elaborately, 'After the Summer of Like' (2005) is a three-seater sofa that Hughes has re-upholstered in dyed canvas (making the sculpture a painting of sorts).
The redundant design, which one associates with suburban lounges, together with the faded colours, suggests the sofa has done its time, as if stuck in a kind of limbo wherein images and objects from the recent past are at their most abject and invisible, invested with neither newness nor nostalgia'. (4) Reviewing Hughes' first London solo show, The Shelf Life of Milk (The Showroom, 2004) David Barrett writes 'A burned match rests on the edge of a cheap formica shelf, the last speck of orange light glowing in its blackened head. We've missed the drama - the sparking and flaring into life - and were left with a dying glimmer. This is the moment. Not the dramatic white heat of its brief burning, nor the smoking charcoal carcass, but these few in-between seconds of an ember that will soon succumb to the inevitable.
It is this moment, or its cultural equivalent, that Richard Hughes is fascinated by'. (5) 'Of course its not really a match, but a sculpture alluminium and modeling clay with a pin light buried in its head hence its perpetual last gasp. So, now we can see that its not matches that Hughes is interested in, but culture: the flowering of a subculture into the mainstream as the attitudes and beliefs of a small group chime with a changing society, then the slow death as the trappings of the subculture become emptied of their original beliefs and slip first into parody and then irrelevance. The suspended ember of a match is simply a metaphor, but a useful one'. 6
Currently selected for the British Art Show 6, Hughes (b. 1974) has exhibited nationally and internationally since graduating from Goldsmiths College, London (MA, 2003). He was the East International Award winner in 2003.
His solo exhibitions include RomaRomaRoma, Rome, 2003, The Shelf Life of Milk, The Showroom, London, 2004, and The Modern Institute, Glasgow, 2005. Hughes was included in Bridge Freezes Before Road, curated by Neville Wakefield at Barbara Gladstone, New York, 2005 and he will have his first international solo show at Nils Staerk, Copenhagen, from 18 November to 22 December.
Hughes is represented by The Modern Institute, Glasgow. He lives and works in London.
References 1 Alex Farquharson, Richard Hughes: The decay of modernity, melancholy objects and shared cultural moments, Frieze, issue 95, November/December 2005, p. 118. 2 Press release, Richard Hughes: What A Dude'll Do, Nils Staerk, Copenhagen, November 2005 3 Farquharson, p. 118. 4 Farquharson, p. 118. 5 Farquharson, p. 118. 6 David Barrett, Richard Hughes, Art Monthly, issue 281, November 2004, p. 18. 7 Barrett, p. 19
November 2005
Further information
Keep on Keeping On, Rob TufnellThe statement 'Lets not and say we did' proposes some inconsequential dishonesty. The phrase is applied by Richard Hughes as the title for a wall drawing, a trompe l'oeil painting, a minor... read on
