A visual game of perspective

Wait a minute, is it just me, or is that painting really moving? Perhaps I should have my eyes examined, or better still, take a good rest.

Don`t worry. It`s not you. It`s the painting that`s playing games.

Quizzical yet surprisingly familiar, works of British artist Patrick Hughes are like a visual game of rumination on the history of art, perspective and surrealism. Brainy and goofy, his images confound and trick a viewer`s senses. As you move, the paintings change, thereby forcing you into an active participation.

Working on bumpy board constructions with the "reverse-perspective (reverspective)" technique - a painting method where the laws of perspective are turned inside out, making closer things smaller and faraway things larger - Hughes has been working to bring the wooden lump of space to life before a viewer`s eyes for more than 40 years.

Although everything about his art is head-achingly hard to classify, Hughes claims that his "moving" illusions are not meant to confuse viewers. He merely wants to clarify the relation to reality by challenging the preconceived assumption of the eye and the brain.

"Why do my still paintings appear to move? Because we prefer to believe these solid bodies are moving rather than accept that our bodies and eyes are out of kilter. The power of artificial perspective is based on gravity. The force of gravity is vertical, but it results in a lot of horizontals as things rest on the surface of the earth or parallel to it," the artist explains.

It is no wonder that Hughes` surrealistic art world has been widely admired, not only by the Tate Gallery London, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Denver Museum, and Houston University in the United States, but also by celebrities including Oprah Winfrey and Hugh Heffner.

Finally, the most recent works of the talented surrealist have come to Seoul, inviting Korean viewers to join in the visual game of perspective.

Born in 1939 in Birmingham, England, Hughes was fascinated by paradoxes and visual trickery from childhood. As a youngster, he sheltered from the German bombs under a staircase during the London Blitz and was riveted by what the staircase looked like from underneath - the reversal of its normal self. The artist recalls today that he began pondering on what became an obsession with perverse or backward perspective from then on.

Inspired by Paul Klee, Marcel Duchamp and Rene Magritte, Hughes self-taught art to himself and traveled down from his home in Leeds in 1961 to open his first solo exhibition at the Portal Gallery in Mayfair.

In 1964, Hughes made his first reverspective works, introducing a pleasant surprise to the international art world.

Hughes created two seemingly identical works both entitled the "Hughes Henge" in 1998, as a humorous reference to Stonehenge in the British county of Wiltshire. The two versions were created with one image as a "sticking-out" painting and the other completely flat. Impossible to distinguish one from another when reproduced in photography, Hughes was once again applauded for his experimental artistic drive.

"My philosophy is paradox. I am of a logical cast of mind and find common sense hopeless. I embrace the contradictory and celebrate the paradoxical. A paradox to me is like a pearl," the artist said.

Currently working with Matthew Flowers, the director of Flowers East Gallery in England, Hughes is also an author of three books on visual and verbal rhetoric including "Vicious Circles and Infinity: A Panoply of Paradoxes (1975)."

The exhibition will run through May 26 at Park Ryu Sook Gallery near Cheongdam Station, Subway Line No. 7, Exit 9. For more information, visit www.parkryusookgallery.co.kr. For further details on the artist, visit www.patrickhughes.co.uk

(hayney@heraldm.com)

By Shin Hae-in