Is it cool to just talk about detail? When we talk about art? Or is that too bourgeois?
‘Cause for me the operative expressive element of these is the application of an 8-bit Atari-ish sensisibility to a heavily Hockney-fied sense of detail.
They also remind me some of Dufy. The space is more Hockney, though.
There’s a weird kind of sensuality about them…something about the combined effect of a fold-out couch and the hot tub (swimming pool? either way, let the good times roll).
‘Doom for interior decorators’ = the Sims = Duh, Sam…
I keep wondering if the hipness of architecture/interior design programs is related to the number of people painting fantastical yet empty interiors. Or maybe it’s all about the virtual living–the internet making the domestic space more thrilling than public or populated spaces.
Also, Sam, I think I saw something like the hideaway bed/hot tub combo in the NY Times Magazine a year or so back in an article about urban small-space luxury living. London might equal smaller spaces and more luxurious living, so there you go.
Hm…maybe no one? In an everyday sense at least.
I see it more as a really tasty flop house.
I have to admit, I really do like the cross-pollinated feeling I get from these. Hot tub mischief + Legos + color/pattern indulgence +Hockney-esque spacial crunch. Probably everyone else is drinking mojitos, but I’d sip a lager with slow abandon while the DJ conjures up 8-bit soundtracks and kraut rock and snippets of Serge Gainsbourg. Fantastic. How did I get invited to this party?
I love the type of space one mentally lays out when reading. This type of paintings allow us that mind play in spatial logic, but also gives us all sorts of fun suggestions. It gives us the tools to create a rich imaginated place, like an amplifier for our own visual daydream.
Wait, carla, go into that a little more, about the type of space one lays out when reading? You mean, like if I was reading fiction what sort of spaces I half work-up in my mind to surround the action?
Also, Matt, I totally agree about Weischer being key here (Doig, too), but I do feel like something about this kind of painting constructing this kind of space has to hit some kind of deeper note than a single artist’s influence can account for. There just seems to be so many viable variations.
I feel that it’s different than the way, say Jenny Saville’s influence seems to exert itself.
Yes Chris, that sort of space. For some time I’ve thought about how some visual images approach space this way. Not showing any real illusion, optical or pictorial, but giving enough clues that we can’t help but experience a space/place. Just what arena of perception is this, where we experience an imagined place?
It also happens a lot in untrained artists’ work. Their awkward decisions make it impossible to experience anything other than a designation of space/place. But once we know of a place, once we’ve been given the idea of its existence, it seems just as vibrant of reality as a pictorial illusion….maybe more so???
In Hughes work here, this is just one bit of the experience. These are so open-ended, and loaded, and vacant, and on and on. But for me, they have the basic narrative richness of a designated place. I think this is a powerful anchor for what all else these do.
Interesting to note the distinctions between similar such work.
Also, I don’t mean to imply imagining a sentimental experience of place. I don’t think of these places in real living terms. I don’t imagine having real experiences in these places.
It’s more that the perceptual universe where imagined spaces exist (in our heads) is not dissimilar to how we experience this type of painted place.
i wonder if it’s a kind of iconography of space, you know? what you are describing here carla is kind of what i think about when looking at giotto. not that there isn’t illusion, or a good-faith attempt at illusion, but instead that what is being relied on is an intuition of space via a paired-down shorthanded “place holder” instead of rendering perspective/value/atmospherics. does that make any sense? i think some naive or untrained artists do this, but so do folks like roger brown.
Matt, I hear where you are coming from here, but I don’t think the question of how space works in these has been fully answered yet (or maybe can be).
I don’t see in Hughes an “intuition of space”. Though not strictly (or even loosely) perspectival or tonal in spatial terms, a kind of pictorial space that has potency and zeal asserts itself. These discreet areas of pattern and facture, sudden collisions between graphic and chromatic languages induce a “read” that for me is very much about traveling a space, though not with a haptic or bodily orientation. The space is explicit, nonsensical, and blatant.
And although Chris and Sam may not want Deconstruction’s ugly head reared here, I can’t help but feel paintings like that above revel in an ambiguity and embrace disharmony as the very fabric of the work. Almost as if the artist recognizes that the work has reached some culmination, has come together by virtue of the fact that it has completely REFUSED to come together….
Chris brings up the vogue for interior design and architecture programs/virtuality and gaming as possible conditioning factors in the ubiquity of this type of image. Can we safely add HGTV-and- TLC- style house porn, Trading Spaces/Extreme Makover/Flip That House? These Lynchian, semi-ominous semi-whimsical spaces have the feeling of some kind of crazy “reveal”.
Matthew C., I don’t see this work as an ending point. This way of organizing and presenting space is a restructuring, yes, and while it is reductionist in one sense, the possiblities for imagery explode out from there.
And these pictorial possibilities are exciting in very much the same way that traditional art always has been. It’s physically all happening within the picture frame.
Carla, I agree completely, this work embracing contradiction opens up all kinds of possiblities…didn’t mean to imply a dead-end, quite the opposite!
Your mention of “tradition” is apt, in that it points up how often those who we locate within tradition are actually those who challenged, subverted, and therefore, redefined and reinvigorated tradition.
Is it cool to just talk about detail? When we talk about art? Or is that too bourgeois?
‘Cause for me the operative expressive element of these is the application of an 8-bit Atari-ish sensisibility to a heavily Hockney-fied sense of detail.
Naw, that’s fun talking. A thought-making assessment. Put another way, it’s like Doom but designed for interior decorators…?
They also remind me some of Dufy. The space is more Hockney, though.
There’s a weird kind of sensuality about them…something about the combined effect of a fold-out couch and the hot tub (swimming pool? either way, let the good times roll).
‘Doom for interior decorators’ = the Sims = Duh, Sam…
I keep wondering if the hipness of architecture/interior design programs is related to the number of people painting fantastical yet empty interiors. Or maybe it’s all about the virtual living–the internet making the domestic space more thrilling than public or populated spaces.
I’d like to see some interiors of churches…
Also, Sam, I think I saw something like the hideaway bed/hot tub combo in the NY Times Magazine a year or so back in an article about urban small-space luxury living. London might equal smaller spaces and more luxurious living, so there you go.
Who would live in this apartment?
Hm…maybe no one? In an everyday sense at least.
I see it more as a really tasty flop house.
I have to admit, I really do like the cross-pollinated feeling I get from these. Hot tub mischief + Legos + color/pattern indulgence +Hockney-esque spacial crunch. Probably everyone else is drinking mojitos, but I’d sip a lager with slow abandon while the DJ conjures up 8-bit soundtracks and kraut rock and snippets of Serge Gainsbourg. Fantastic. How did I get invited to this party?
Oh– right, I didn’t.
i think weischer started this party…
I love the type of space one mentally lays out when reading. This type of paintings allow us that mind play in spatial logic, but also gives us all sorts of fun suggestions. It gives us the tools to create a rich imaginated place, like an amplifier for our own visual daydream.
Wait, carla, go into that a little more, about the type of space one lays out when reading? You mean, like if I was reading fiction what sort of spaces I half work-up in my mind to surround the action?
Also, Matt, I totally agree about Weischer being key here (Doig, too), but I do feel like something about this kind of painting constructing this kind of space has to hit some kind of deeper note than a single artist’s influence can account for. There just seems to be so many viable variations.
I feel that it’s different than the way, say Jenny Saville’s influence seems to exert itself.
Yes Chris, that sort of space. For some time I’ve thought about how some visual images approach space this way. Not showing any real illusion, optical or pictorial, but giving enough clues that we can’t help but experience a space/place. Just what arena of perception is this, where we experience an imagined place?
It also happens a lot in untrained artists’ work. Their awkward decisions make it impossible to experience anything other than a designation of space/place. But once we know of a place, once we’ve been given the idea of its existence, it seems just as vibrant of reality as a pictorial illusion….maybe more so???
In Hughes work here, this is just one bit of the experience. These are so open-ended, and loaded, and vacant, and on and on. But for me, they have the basic narrative richness of a designated place. I think this is a powerful anchor for what all else these do.
Interesting to note the distinctions between similar such work.
Also, I don’t mean to imply imagining a sentimental experience of place. I don’t think of these places in real living terms. I don’t imagine having real experiences in these places.
It’s more that the perceptual universe where imagined spaces exist (in our heads) is not dissimilar to how we experience this type of painted place.
i wonder if it’s a kind of iconography of space, you know? what you are describing here carla is kind of what i think about when looking at giotto. not that there isn’t illusion, or a good-faith attempt at illusion, but instead that what is being relied on is an intuition of space via a paired-down shorthanded “place holder” instead of rendering perspective/value/atmospherics. does that make any sense? i think some naive or untrained artists do this, but so do folks like roger brown.
Matt, I hear where you are coming from here, but I don’t think the question of how space works in these has been fully answered yet (or maybe can be).
I don’t see in Hughes an “intuition of space”. Though not strictly (or even loosely) perspectival or tonal in spatial terms, a kind of pictorial space that has potency and zeal asserts itself. These discreet areas of pattern and facture, sudden collisions between graphic and chromatic languages induce a “read” that for me is very much about traveling a space, though not with a haptic or bodily orientation. The space is explicit, nonsensical, and blatant.
And although Chris and Sam may not want Deconstruction’s ugly head reared here, I can’t help but feel paintings like that above revel in an ambiguity and embrace disharmony as the very fabric of the work. Almost as if the artist recognizes that the work has reached some culmination, has come together by virtue of the fact that it has completely REFUSED to come together….
Chris brings up the vogue for interior design and architecture programs/virtuality and gaming as possible conditioning factors in the ubiquity of this type of image. Can we safely add HGTV-and- TLC- style house porn, Trading Spaces/Extreme Makover/Flip That House? These Lynchian, semi-ominous semi-whimsical spaces have the feeling of some kind of crazy “reveal”.
Matthew C., I don’t see this work as an ending point. This way of organizing and presenting space is a restructuring, yes, and while it is reductionist in one sense, the possiblities for imagery explode out from there.
And these pictorial possibilities are exciting in very much the same way that traditional art always has been. It’s physically all happening within the picture frame.
Matt B. , I really don’t think the same way about Roger Brown. I don’t imagine a place with those.
Carla, I agree completely, this work embracing contradiction opens up all kinds of possiblities…didn’t mean to imply a dead-end, quite the opposite!
Your mention of “tradition” is apt, in that it points up how often those who we locate within tradition are actually those who challenged, subverted, and therefore, redefined and reinvigorated tradition.