VISUAL ARTS:DESPITE THE heavy-duty title - The Gradual Materialisation of Essence- there is a playful quality to Ronnie Hughes's exhibition at the Rubicon Gallery, writes Aidan Dunne
What we see on the walls is mostly taken from the same body of work as his major show at the Millennium Court Arts Centre earlier this year; that is, drawings that stem from residencies at the Albers Foundation in Connecticut and the Vermont Studio Centre, and related paintings. The drawings are small in scale and hung on the wall in a grid formation. They work well together, partly because each one is so different from the next, though they do share something hard to define, like a quality of pitch, or sensibility.
Certain elements recur, and elements is an apposite word, because often the drawings and paintings bring to mind models or diagrams of molecules, structures with brightly coloured circles connected by lines. Smartie-coloured dots and discs feature a lot, as do linear frameworks both angled and curved, and origami-like patterns, together with other more organic-looking shapes. There's both lightness and deliberation to Hughes's touch, and the result is a playful seriousness.
Everything in the work is, in a sense, familiar. Taken piecemeal, every ingredient is simple and straightforward, as though Hughes is at pains to let us know that he is not hiding anything, not trying to trick us. At the same time, the images are unfamiliar, because we are not quite sure how to read or interpret them. The thing about them is that they are a lot like the world we manage to make sense of all the time. By nature, they seem to be systems or networks devised according to codes and rules, but they are ultimately anomalous.
In terms of our everyday experience, they encourage us to think that we can accommodate them in our current theory of everything or, conversely, that we can adjust our theory sufficiently so that it, and they, still make sense, which is what we do all the time when we encounter something new. Hughes prompts us to initiate this process of adjustment or recategorisation, but he also prevents us from completing it, pushing us into a state of indeterminacy.
It is not that he presents us with blatant impossibilities that play with our process of perception and understanding, like Dalí's meticulously realistic melting clock or Magritte's conjunction of night and day in one scene. Hughes wants a more sustained engagement with the possibility of recognition, the promise that we can assimilate an image and, with adjustment, fit it into a scheme of coherence. But despite making many connections, and perhaps making some relevant metaphoric leaps, we can never quite make enough adjustments to restore things to a state of normality.
There's nothing new about saying that a great many painters want to keep us guessing, to keep our eyes and our minds working, inconclusively. That's what keeps them in a job, you could say, apart from the fact that they also like to keep themselves guessing. Yet it's also true that Hughes's images are satisfying, that they are complete. He has a distinctive palette, favouring a certain creaminess of tone that makes for approachable surfaces. The quality of touch is important too. The drawings are all on the surface, and every mark is visible and counts. The paintings can be covered over again and again, and indeed they look as if they contain several layers of revision. Yet they have an immediacy of touch: the scaffolding of creamy white lines that makes up Plexus is composed of individual brushstrokes that are entirely visible. There's no room for error. The painting depends on the mood and rhythm that Hughes has established in working through it, so that what we see, the white latticework overlying a sumptuous green ground, is recognisably the culmination of a long process of exploration that we don't see.
AT GALLERY NUMBER ONE, Through the Eyes of a Museis an exhibition of photographs by Pattie Boyd, who, having inspired a number of ardent love songs from Eric Clapton and George Harrison, and having been a partner to both, certainly merits the "muse" epithet.
Boyd began working as a model while still in her teens. She meet Harrison when working as a extra on A Hard Day's Night, and thereafter joined the rock aristocracy. But as her memoir, written with journalist Penny Junor, makes graphically clear, being married to a rock star is not all fun and games.
It is partly fun and games, though, to judge from her photographs.
She began exhibiting them in 2005 and they fall into two distinct groups. One is a retrospective look at life with Harrison, Clapton and their wider circle, including the other Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Boyd reputedly introduced The Beatles to the Maharishi, and he's there too. Generally, everyone seems to be having a nice time. The images come across as being enlargements of casual snapshots. They're not terrible, but neither do they suggest that Boyd had a real eye when she took them. They are interesting, if they are interesting to you, because of their subjects.
The other group of pictures is more technically polished, more recent and more self-consciously arty, featuring several exotic locations. Again they are okay, though hardly more than formulaic.
AT THE Paul Kane Gallery, there's a nice variation on the group exhibition theme. Three gallery artists each invited an artist of their choosing and all six show work. Philippa Sutherland, who shows three fine monochromatic paintings, including the terrific Full Moon, invited Fionna Murray, whose carefully elaborated works exemplify another, usefully complementary way of approaching representation. Marc Reilly, who shows watercolours that function very well as a set, invited Anthony Lyttle, a thoughtful, interesting artist. Jackie Nickerson shows fine photographs from her series on farm workers in southern Africa. She invited Simon Burch, whose subtle, formally exact bog landscape photographs are first-rate. An enjoyable show with some real surprises.
• The Gradual Materialisation of Essence: New Drawing and Paintings by Ronnie Hughes, Rubicon Gallery, until Oct 11; Through the Eyes of a Muse: Photographs by Pattie Boyd, Gallery Number One, exhibition concluded; By Invitation, Paul Kane Gallery, until Sat
