C105 review

Derry: Patrick Bradley and Peter Hughes at Context

From the opening ante room in the Context Gallery one can establish that this show is seeped in the literary imagination. The preamble to the main space is a collection of small works on paper that provides a pastoral introduction. Titles such as Lotus, Wier, Snowdrops give some indication to where these artists base their concerns.

Both work in an ethereal lyrical abstraction, which takes sources from landscape and the mnemonics of life in it, mapping and balancing compositions like a kind of musical notation. Patrick Bradley's paintings are problematic in their use of white and Spartan use of colour. Their airiness is their poetic strength. Seeped in the reverie of summer. The whorls of finger painting link the naïve execution with the reverie of childhood summers. The painting That summer! simmers in heated light, opalescent. Reminiscent of Philip Guston's treatment of both abstraction and figuration. The rectangular shapes blur in its hazy grid-like array of coloured fields.

Patrick Bradley: Apotheosis; courtesy Context Gallery;

White painting, Nebulous and Cloth make a kind of triptych in their paleness. One landscape-format, one portrait and one square.

Obvious equations with white and innocence are difficult to avoid.

Their tactile quality and spareness is similar to that of De Staël and Lisa Milroy.

Confectionary-like pinks, blues and yellow features sit on the white clotted grounds like crumbs of an Arcadian picnic. Their edges diffuse their reworking like the airy edges of a Morandi still life.

Painting's facticity is a significant feature; the handling by palette knife and brushes shows a liking for the substance of paint.

Two tall canvases are an excursion into more direct references. A beach or strand with grassy dunes sits within a grey/off-white ground. The other has three cruciform features that have obvious associations. They inform the other works by their anchorage in the visibly real and symbolic but are less effective as a result.

The content of the more successful work is a hybrid of the pursued lyricism and the formal and tactile use of the stuff of paint.

The paintings Spangle, That summer! and Cloth resonate with accomplishment in their proximity to some mnemonic reverie achieved in paint.

The three panels of Peter Hughes, all predominantly blue, square in format, are placed close together, implying a narrative or repositioning of view to a place or event.

It is difficult not to kink the dominant blue with all its cultural and literary baggage - sombre, depths, the aquatic, blue periods, the list goes on. An immediate hurdle to overcome in this work, but it is a vital contrast to the white of the other work on show.

Peter Hughes: Sherrif's Mountain; courtesy Context Gallery

The first, a split composition of pink and blue, urban in feel, punctuated with white points of light. It has a graphic quality. The second, a high horizon with a row of verticals like trees, reflected in the lower section, an aquatic reference. The blue here is wintry and watery. The third, wholly submerged in cerulean blue, crosscut with a Klimt-like grid, decorative and musical in its iteration. Beyond the formal these are evocative pieces subsumed in the problematic of colour's associative meaning. Their treatment is sedimentary in their layering and removal of features, like some natural process.

The smaller works, Bog cotton, are a series of square panels; again a narrative might be read into their seriality. A shifting and changing, time passing. These works seem more delicate and their scale provides an intimacy that lends strength. The grey, white and ochre devices reminiscent of Agnes Martin's minimal notation but rooted firmly in the pastoral.

There is one small work that reflects Hughes' delicacy, Snowdrops. White, grey and green flecks, fingermarks, flit across a silvery ground. A single red sits in the corner like a Japanese seal on a scroll, the nature of painting a haiku. The titles suggest sedimentary working and reworking; yet this piece demonstrates an elegance that gets lost in the larger work.

Both artists reveal particular sensibilities, Bradley's spare lyricism is playful, like the trajectory of Philip Guston from abstraction to figuration; Hughes' naturalistic process echoes Pier Kirkeby, his smaller work more elegant and intimate. This show is a fresh and gladdening addition to the Context's program.

Damien Duffy is an artist living and working in Derry.

Patrick Bradley and Peter Hughes, Context Gallery, Derry, July 2003

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