A recent study in California showed that 3D films were no more immersive or enjoyable than their 2D counterparts. If anything, they were more likely to give you eyestrain and a headache. This is my equally non-scientific response to the works of Patrick Hughes, an original 1960s painter turned gimmicky sticky-outy picture innovator. Thrusting from the wall like Madonna’s ‘Vogue’-era bustieres, these magic-eye panels appear, illogically, to be receding into deep, perspectival space: down streets, corridors or between bookshelves.
Staring at the shifting museum walls of ‘Superduperpersective’ (2002) is like pitching around inside a ship on rough sea – your body, eyes and brain can’t agree about what you’re seeing and soon the novelty of your predicament is replaced by mild nausea.
The largely self-taught Hughes, despite churning out these reverse projection paintings for the best part of two decades, proves himself never-less-than inventive across this two-venue retrospective (or should that be retroperspective?). In two works from 1964 a door and a footprint push through the picture planes, while ‘Moonlight Askance’ of 1985 features a light bulb dangling insouciantly to help illuminate an average snow-covered nightscape. These concerted attacks on the surface and conventions of flat art seem like a painter seriously interrogating his medium, pushing its limits and creating works of important contemporary enquiry.
Better than that, they are funny, too. Take the bland landscape of endless motorway that is repeated in the rear-view mirror of ‘Déjà Vu’ (from 1976, but replicated by Julian Opie in video form in the early ’90s) or Hughes’ incredibly witty ‘Liquorice Allsorts’ (1973) in which he debunks the abstract painterly language favoured by many of his colleagues as nothing but child’s play for a figurative artist such as himself. While never as painfully existential as Magritte, Hughes did pop-brightness as well as Peter Blake and linear deadpanning as well as Michael Craig-Martin. If only he hadn’t gone down that ‘Alice in Wonderland’ rabbit hole of eye-watering tricksiness.