Patrick Hughes

Patrick Hughes has established an international reputation as a painter of paradox. His painted reliefs are literally moving pictures which use reverse perspective as a device to include the viewer ñ the far points of the picture are nearer than the near points of the picture. Throughout his career he has exhibited prodigiously and has recently shown at Flowers East in London and at the Museum of Industry and Science in Chicago. His work features in many collections across the world including those of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Tate Gallery, the University of Houston, Texas and the Arts Council.

Patrick Hughes's work.

Workshops often have the mountainous breasts of young women as decoration on their walls. The superb workshops at CERN have pin-ups of the Alps on their walls: representations of nature at its most spectacular, arbitrary and rugged. On one half of my painting I use six pictures of the Alps to represent nature.

The culture of science is depicted by six doors, loosely based on doors I saw at CERN containing measuring instruments. They represent my inability to know what they do. I was very impressed by the huge hinged electro-magnets at CERN, that are, in effect, doors. Doors can reveal and conceal secrets.

Because my doors are made and painted in perspective, which is how things naturally appear to diminish when they are further away, they confuse us. And because they are constructed outside-in, and inside-out, the observer sees them as moving. As you move to the right they seem to move to the left and open, and reveal nature, and as you move to the left to close, obscuring the view. Eddington said in The Nature of the Physical World (1928), that to an observer all the information that led him to believe that the train was leaving the station could equally well lead him to believe the station was leaving the train. My viewers prefer to believe the doors are moving than to remember that they themselves are.

Nature and Culture is an attempt to represent the relationship between science and nature through the medium of art. My art is loosely based on the understanding of the workings of the perceptual mind. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the mind perceives by using a diverse set of active presumptions, rather than the 'image on the retina' being decoded by a central intelligence. I hope my picture is an example of how we see. Heisenberg wrote: 'When we speak of the picture of nature in the exact science of our age, we do not mean a picture of nature so much as a picture of our relationships with nature.'

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