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July 21, 2009
Patrick Huges - Reverse Perspective
I saw an amazing piece of art on display in a gallery in Aspen this weekend. It appeared to be a normal flat painting, but when you walked by it, the perspective changed in a surreal, preternatural way. My eyes and my brain couldn't reconcile what was going one before me.
I was floored by it, and didn't understand it at all. It was both exhilarating and disturbing at once.
I called Jennifer over and she saw it right away as well, and we were both just dumbfounded.
I walked around the gallery until I found another one of his pieces on display. On the second piece, I could see that what my eyes had mistakenly interpreted as a flat piece of art was actually a very meticulously constructed three-dimensional illusion. Basically, the works consist of a series of truncated pyramids protruding from a backboard. These pyramid shapes are then painted in a reverse perspective so that the parts physically closest to the observer are painted as distant objects, and the parts physically most distant from the observer are painted as closer objects.
I've not explained it well, but the illusion is both dramatic and disturbing. If you get a chance to see some of these works by Patrick Hughes, you should check them out.
Posted by Rob Kiser on July 21, 2009 at 9:13 PM
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