James Hugonin’s exhibition at Ingleby Gallery will celebrate the completion of his Binary Rhythm sequence. Seven of the nine large paintings that Hugonin has made over the past six years will be exhibited, all identically sized and each continuing the artist’s unique exploration of the dualities of order and chance within a very personal approach to abstract painting.
Hugonin has been working in this way for the last thirty years and each new painting employs his now familiar language of tiny rectangular marks, applied in their thousands, colour by colour, within a grid onto a gessoed ground. Each work is painted over many months and evolves gradually from the last with increasingly complex and surprising results.
They are unlike any other paintings being made in the world today: owing something perhaps to Seurat’s pointillism or the early works of Agnes Martin, but with an optical charge that is entirely individual and an internally generated sense of pace that invites the eye gently into and across the surface of the paint.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a new publication in which essays by Michael Tooby and Iris Priest explore the Hugonin's way of working and, in particular, his use of handwritten notebooks; plotting the course of each painting, much like a musical score.
The continuing importance of music to Hugonin's practice will be celebrated in a concert at Ingleby Gallery on Friday 30 October. For further details, please contact Ingleby Gallery on info@inglebygallery.com or +44 (0) 131 556 4441.
