THE EPIC PAINTINGS OF SHARA HUGUES

Viewpoint

With her exhilarating canvases, this 38-year- old Brooklyn-based artist demonstrates all the enduring power of painting. Her exceptional talent as a colourist gives birth to fascinating, fantastical, fantasy landscapes of pure chromatic joy.

“Today painters are proliferating like

mushrooms, with an epidemic virulence that forces both fear and admiration. No one escapes the contagion, and sometimes the cases are deadly. He who the night before goes to bed a lawyer, a journalist, a civil servant or a doorman wakes up the next day a painter.” These aren’t my words ( though they could be) but Octave Mirbeau’s, published in 1892 in Le Figaro in an article on the Salon du Champ de Mars – an annual event founded in 1890 by the Société nationale des beaux-arts that could be considered a distant ancestor of our era’s biennials. Today painting is proliferating once more, and perhaps that’s a good thing. In any case the work of the young New Yorker Shara Hughes gives reason to think so.

Cynics will no doubt say that the current profusion of painting is the simple consequence of market forces: it’s easier to buy and hang a small rectangular canvas in your home than to find space for a 200 m2 installation comprising video projections, a score of dancers and drones, a flock of falcons and a fire eater. While one may be a fan of Anne Imhof’s performances (which won her the Golden Lion at the last Venice Biennale), in the end it’s much simpler to live with a painting by Joe Bradley. The cynics aren’t entirely wrong, but it can also be said that it’s harder to make a “good” painting than to produce a spectacular installation. Paintings don’t offer any of installations’ seductive subterfuges, all those fantasy effects that are often used to mask a paucity or banality of ideas and a distinct lack of style. With painting, the rule is invariable: it takes a lot of effort to be convincing and, if possible, original on a simple rectangular surface. While installations, at the historical moment they were adopted by artists, were the perfect vector for provocation, their bling and entertainment value have now become so common that there’s nothing provocative about them anymore. All of which is to say that, if one were being optimistic, young artists’ current return to painting could be taken as a sign that they’re ready to confront a medium that is so historic that it has produced literally hundreds of masterpieces and just as many examples of formal inventiveness.

Shara Hughes was born in 1981 in Atlanta, and studied at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, and afterwards at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison. She lived for a while in Denmark before set ting up in Brooklyn, her current base. Her participation in the 2017 Whitney Biennial was an important moment in her sofar brief career; of the 60- odd artists exhibited, around 15 were painters, most of them women. Those who hadn’t seen her 2016 show Trips I’ve Never Been On at New York’s Marlborough Gallery were given the chance to discover her undeniable talent and originality. Those who love and are familiar with the history of painting will straightaway see in her large and excessively colourful landscapes a serious erudition on which she calls without the slightest inhibition, facilitating, if it were necessary, the evocation of Matisse or Hockney, the stylistic inventions of Munch or Cézanne, the pictorial strategies of Philip Guston or Josh Smith, all the way to the oh-so-personal manner of Van Gogh. This vast history is usually the pretext for a rather snobbish and above all lazy defeatism (“Everything

has already been done in painting”), but Hughes has made of it a strength, prolonging it without renouncing its raison d’être – inventiveness. Most of all, there’s nothing else in her pictures: no edifying discourse about the world, no claims for this or for that, none of the boring chatter that today is the essential subject matter of works it would be impossible to look at in any way other than through what they’re trying to recount, precisely because they’re devoid of any quality other than the background noise of their narrative pretensions.

“I was making a lot of minimal paintings about dead animals, but used as furniture. So, for example, bearskin rugs and heads on walls and stuff, which then I think turned into some larger kind of weird trend,” says Hughes, before adding, “When I first started doing interiors it always felt like the best resolution to everything for me. Within an interior, you can make a landscape through a window or you can make another person’s painting within the painting, or you can paint figures or not.” A comment that demonstrates that her artistic project is to do with making paintings that embrace all the possibilities of painting, and that painting itself is the subject of her oeuvre. More recently she has moved on from interiors to landscapes that use a lot of different techniques all at once – oil, airbrush, trowel, paintbrush – and which trust only the imagination: all of them are imaginary scenes that depict no real or even precise place, and Hughes begins them without a specific idea in mind. In short it’s painting itself that constructs and composes the picture, guided by a knowledge of what this medium has represented all throughout history. Entitled Don’t Hold Your Breath, her exhibition of some of these landscapes at the Eva Presenhuber gallery in Zürich last year, which showed forests, hurricanes, and windswept brushwood and beaches, gave a brilliant demonstration of the distinct possibility of doing painting in a new, different and inventive way. It also made perfectly clear the entirely accessory nature of the subject matter (something we’ve known ever since Cézanne painted apples or the Montagne SainteVictoire), and it’s highly likely that Hughes chose landscape because it’s an immediately identifiable and reassuring subject – not terribly important, in short. Reassured by the subject, freed from identifying it since the scenes are imaginary, and moreover spared all narrative chatter, the viewer can abandon herself without hindrance to Hughes’s painting and contemplate it in its essential state as simply painting. In these pictures Hughes shows her extraordinary talent as a colourist, one who is unafraid of venturing into every excess, forbids herself no audacity and who every time succeeds in transporting us into her wild and fantastic compositions.

Hughes was born in precisely the

year of A New Spirit in Painting, a show at London’s Royal Academy of Art that was curated by Sir Norman Rosenthal (an art historian and the R. A.’s secretary of exhibitions) alongside Christos Joachimides and Nicholas Serota. It was an exhibition that marked the annals because it clearly showed the “renewal” of painting, or at any rate its resistance in the face of newer media like photography, video or installations which dominated artistic production at the time. This renewal took the form of NeoExpressionism and the Trans-avantgarde, and the R. A. show featured figures who would go on to have spectacular careers, such as Julian Schnabel, for example. The same Norman Rosenthal last year put on a show at the Galerie Almine Rech, during London’s Frieze Art Fair, which was titled A New Spirit Then, A New Spirit Now, 1981– 2018 and which traced the links between these two eras, demonstrating painting’s continued resistance 37 years later. History’s facetiousness made itself felt in the fact that the dinner given to celebrate the show’s opening was held in London’s Arts Club (one of those fabulous English clubs which have few equivalents elsewhere in the world and cer tainly not in Paris) where, as it happened, recent work by Hughes had been hung; indeed it was in front of a large landscape by Hughes that the elegant Sir Norman not only dined but also gave an exceptional speech in which he explained his undying fascination for painting as well as recalling that, to his knowledge, the 1981 show had featured no female, gay or black artists ( The Art Newspaper ran the headline “A New Spirit of Painting makes a comeback (with one woman artist this time)” – you’d have to have very little to say about painting to indulge in such a simplistic enumeration). With a very British smile, Rosenthal ended his speech with a joyful, “You couldn’t do that anymore today,” before going off, he claimed, to sing Lili Marleen at the Georg Baselitz opening.