The Moon Grove contemporary art space (Manchester, UK) is currently home to Dean Hughes exhibition 'Felt Tip Drawings'.
Hughes has spent the last few decades editing the white noise of the world by producing small sculptures and domestic scale work on and with paper. The linearity of threads and cuts, the puncture and catch of stitch, process and procedure directing him towards a binding reductive aesthetic, but all carrying a polite invitation to concentrate on the materiality grounding his minimal interventions on A4 paper and miniature cardboard birdbox-like shapes. Small articles compressing the ponderous heft and bulk of traditional minimalist sculpture into intimate moments, removing the aggressively impersonal quality of the monumental.
So, considering his previous work, the prospect of a 40 piece drawing show on Moon Grove’s exhibition walls threatens to verge on rococo insanity.
Fortunately, the badgering meanness of meaning is healthily wrongfooted and the work avoids the dampening slap of academic reductionism, an undermining playfulness humanizing his trademark disciplined attention to detail.
As always with Hughes, modalities of attention are at the fore bringing to mind William James notion of ‘attention’; the taking possession by the mind of one out of what seems several simultaneous trains of thought, the withdrawal from some things to deal effectively with others, as, without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Foundational to cognition is a selective precision within focussed attention and the work hinges on this observation.
The first drawing on the entry passage wall shows an anaemic curvature of looping forms sitting on top of the empty substrate of a blank white ground, as empty and weightless as a balloon it still has the organisational certainty of an architectural plan. On closer inspection the lassoing number 8 shape proves to be cuts in the paper. A regular density of cut maintains the illusion of a drawing deposit of ink or pencil graphite; drawing as an absence and as a tangible marking. Additionally, colourful bleeds of felt tip pen inks stain the paper edges on both sides of the cut giving the twinkle of a rainbow thread to the reassembled collaged drawing. There is a gentle phosphene complicity showing the limitations of the visual, the glitching flicker of rods and cones defamiliarizing the materially known.
This technique of colourful staining by a fine bleed into the edge of papers fibre further complicates matters as it embeds the notion of the painterly into the mix. A muffled molecular nervousness at odds with the confidently regular width of the cut lines. Almost apologetically discrete coloured sutures, they hijack the meditative hum of a doodlers meandering output.
The other 39 drawings are roughly grouped in different spaces according to a connective tissue of stylistic similarities. The front room area has largely geometric shapes; inset rectangles, individually or in twos and threes, a simple stacking of triangle into boxy squares, and so on. The next, more idiosyncratic forms mixing straight lines and curves, some seem like overinflated alien letters, there’s an occasional circle. Other display areas have solo works with the line casually wandering with a dreamy indifference, sometimes barely registering as though a cameo from another drawing.
However, the drawings source material may well not originate with Hughes. This is never clear. There is also a wilful amnesia regarding drawings presumed functions, is it a disciplining of mark-making for constructive transcriptions, directive rumblings from the psyche, a mapping of the body’s mechanical capabilities? By reducing hand-generated marks and lines to alien traces of all these possibilities simultaneously the ‘doodles’ become apparitions outside the confines of any notion of lucidity of functional expressive intention. A dismantled codex of drawings formal possibilities infecting Moon Grove’s exhibition walls.
Further, the various groupings and clusters of framed A4 drawings tend towards an implied conventional grid format but with gaps and absences leaving static overhead views of changing car-park huddles of the rectangular format. A suggestion of movement and interchangeability between the A4 units which adds a further feeling of long-term mutability to the drawings internal structures.
So these drawings are both absences and compressions harvesting echoes of loose expressive mark-making and the functionally diagrammatic for decorative and formal impact.
For all their apparent simplicity they demand a degree of attention to detail from the viewer paralleling the attention to detail required for their production. The mediums unanchoring flexibility is placed on display but with a caveat. Drawing is a playground and straitjacket for imaginative wanderings.
Any mediums fuller potential can only be perceived by a shift in the conceptualising perspective of the viewer. A richer engagement with the grounding materiality of the medium becomes the beginning of the pleasurable act of thinking sideways.
Surely a positive outcome for any art show.
