The most recent works by British artist Hugo Wil­son (*1982), all cre­ated between 2018 and 2020, playfully make use of three media: Wil­son’s stylis­tic and thematic strin­gency extends across 17 oil paint­ings, large-format charcoal draw­ings, and sculp­tures in bronze and ceram­ics. In all three media, we wit­ness an exc­it­ing tightrope walk between past and pre­sent: In the manner of the Old Mas­ters—whose technique, col­oration, deploy­ment of light and com­po­si­tion Wil­son adapts with great ease—highly abs­tracted, amorphous objects merge into pow­erful, dynamic move­ments, most of which are cat­a­pulted almost centrifugally from the center of the pic­ture. In a twofold way, these works play with our col­lec­tive visual mem­ory and antic­ipa­tion. First of all, Wil­son’s dramatic com­po­si­tions par­tic­u­larly invoke the art of the Dutch and Ital­ian Baroque per­i­ods, i.e. the era that is today con­sid­ered to be almost emblem­atic of the Euro­pean paint­ing tra­di­tion. In addi­tion, Wil­son’s agglom­er­ates trig­ger numer­ous fig­u­ra­tive asso­cia­tions. In most cases, Wil­son delib­er­ately evokes such notions by hid­ing eyes and extrem­i­ties, feath­ers and furs, pearls and branches in his color swirls—pre­sent­ing them as a start­ing point for our search for fur­ther con­crete picto­rial con­tent. But regard­less of whether we try to trace the com­po­si­tion back to a spe­cific art-histor­ical source or whether we are enticed into identi­fying a dis­tinc­tive fig­u­ra­tive fea­ture: In the end, both trails prove to be fruit­less. Wil­son’s picto­rial inven­tions elude def­i­ni­tion. It is precisely this game with our expecta­tions that the artist is inter­ested in, as he aims at reveal­ing our desire for unambi­gu­ity—for those “truths” men­tioned in the title.weiterlesen