Golden Mean
Press Release - Alex Hudson – Golden Mean
Vegas Gallery is proud to present the first London solo exhibition of the British painter Alex Hudson. Alex Hudson studied at Kingston University and UoA, Wimbledon College of Art, graduated with an MA in Fine Art, painting in 2007. In 2008 he took part at the Bloomberg New Contemporaries exhibition and in 2009 he was selected for the Whitechapel Gallery’s studio programme. Although this is his first solo exhibition, he has already exhibited in the UK, Switzerland, Belgium and will show in Germany and the Netherlands later this year. His work is in private collections in the UK, Denmark, Spain, Luxemburg and the Netherlands.
Alex Hudson interviewed by Paul Carey-Kent, see link
Curator’s Text – ‘The Golden Boat’
The aftermath of an international art event raising questions about the various relationships within the art systems; writing a text on a young English painter in the warm April sun glaring down on Brussels’ Grand Place/Grote Markt. Writing a text for a show entitled ‘Golden Mean’ here, the symmetries –in all the possibilities of that word- are glaringly evident. In every building of this formal square, once the epicentre of a vast and troubled Holy Roman Empire, late seventeenth century architecture dominates. And within each and every one of these impressive buildings staking out its position on the gently sloping cobbled square, The Golden Mean as a form of Holy Grail to be attained within any artifice, work of art or architecture imprints its emphatic discourse, no longer immediately evident in the frenzy of ornate carving and elaborate decoration.
The Golden Mean as an ideal, a sublime phantom, a natural law governing beauty derived for the mimetic efforts of humankind snakes through north European culture for century after century. A Utopian import to the North from its classical Mediterranean roots, the notion of this hidden mathematical key as something to be unlocked by artists and artisans found devoted worshippers within the Northern Renaissance to the extent that by the time Netherlandish culture – torn apart by religious and political differences- reached the late Seventeenth century, it was one of the few things that the rebellious elements and the devoted adherents to Spanish rule could agree upon.
Struggles for supremacy of that age are played out on Brussels’ cobbled stage that literally, from one end, provides us with a conveniently theatrical rake; from the other a deepened sense of perspective. The buildings viewed from one side (the ‘square’ itself is actually far from symmetrical, in part a testament to a much earlier Medieval messiness) offer an encircling sense of the world as a diorama, the Maison du Roi; the symbolic seat of royal power balanced by the even taller Hotel de Ville, the residence of a kind of democracy in which the meritocracy of economics separated power from royal bloodlines and its Habsburg narrative connecting it to the very blood of Christ. Burgundy, even before the story of bloody occupation by the Spanish heirs to empire and equally bloody rebellion played itself out, had long flouted the notion that an anointed monarch should define nationhood. Nobility, a court and birthright, certainly. But it’s unusual situation -in which the fusion of a king to the validation of a distinct cultural identity was eschewed in favour of a much more complex construct-might even be taken as a potential route-not-taken by Europe, a path less travelled in which the French events of 1789 might have been far less inevitable than the events of 1789 before one of the buildings that still stands on Grand Place/Grote Markt.
Balance and symmetry, as we frequently see in Alex Hudson’s work, is not as simple as it may at first seem. The Golden Mean is not a simple matter of two-dimensional measurement: intrinsically within its development as a discourse is an early realisation that what the eye takes in and what the person sees are not the same thing, long before modern science would verify this intuitive understanding. In conveying a sense of beauty, of attempting to tap into an almost primeval sense of the sublime, what is balanced is not always what is equal. And Hudson’s newest body of work explores these ideas in their broadest sense.
It has already been noted that Alex Hudson comes from a generation of British artists whose world was rocked by the substantial shift after the events of 9/11; a generation whose arrogance-waiting-to-happen could not follow the dandy-like path of earlier and more cynical ‘Brit Art’ if it wanted to mark out a position of relevancy for itself in international terms.
Hudson’s paintings frequently look to the ambivalently idealistic positions of early modernist artists – both British and European- trying to negotiate what it meant to be alive after the First World War; the survivors of one apocalypse. In his often monochromatic small paintings that depict what appear to be altars or spaces for ritual, composed of expressionistic geometry and yet entirely representational on some level, one immediately thinks of the works of the architects and visionaries associated with the Bauhaus, long before they developed their ‘International Style’ with which they are now popularly linked.
In the hugely important –and perhaps neglected- exhibition ‘Bau einer neuen Welt: architektonische Visionen des Expressionismus’ at Berlin’s Bauhaus Archiv in 2003 and Rainer Stamm’s equally significant book accompanying the exhibition, we encountered works on paper by the likes of Peter Behrens, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Bruno and Max Taut, Hans Scharoun and their contemporaries long before they developed the vernaculars with which they are now largely associated. In it we encounter expressionistic cathedrals to a humanity trying to heal the wounds of the trenches and their millions of causalities. Wooden spires sear heavenwards as portentous pools of light cut into vast halls; a vision to the ‘Brotherhood of Man’.
In Alex Hudson’s work we encounter uncannily similar visions, intentionally or intuitively, connecting with a generation trying to negotiate a specific global trauma. And, perhaps more alarmingly, we also realise that one of the key learning points of the important Berlin exhibition was that is showed us that both the seeds to a socialist modernism and a nazi evocation of the profound had their roots in the same seed bed. From the fortunate position of hindsight, Alex Husdon’s works only amplify the ambivalence; the fears of a generation eager to live and yet uncertain whether is any longer allowed optimism.
But Hudson is not a painter whose work derives from formulaic research, not an artist whose specific ideas and visions allude to a single source or reference a single movement. We encounter landscapes in which the golden yellow palette casts shadows not only onto an idyllic landscape but strange architectural structures. They appear to be something like the engineering depicted in sci-fi films; grand technology to create vast bubbles within which to build off-world colonies or protect against a Mother Earth made uninhabitable. What remains unclear within Hudson’s seductive and pleasing images is whether we are dealing with an end or a beginning; a beautifully bittersweet death or a new dawn. When the sun sets on his sierra, did the day go well?
In painting a body of work in which the snippets of information allude to a broad range of ideas – everything from Modernism to English landscape traditions- the result is one in which the ambivalence and tentative will for an optimistic path rises to the surface. There is no irony here even though the search for a positive potential outcome is far from naïve. In one work, for example, where a flailing container ship is sinking in a wild sea, it’s difficult to not think of Gericault, a floating group of barrels a potential raft of The Medusa or even Turner’s bizarre light in more melodramatic moments. But, even here, in works that allude to the kind of ‘history painting’ genres that deal with the footnotes of human struggle rather than the grand gestures of famous generals and their battles, we would do well to remember that such works were always about the courage –and luck- of those who survived as much as about the horror of all those who perished.
Ken Pratt