John Hughes is an interdisciplinary artist working in the mediums of painting, sculpture and sound.
His current paintings dramatise the escalators that take us in and out of the guts of the city; underground stations, shopping malls, places of work and by doing so he brings out the conflict between the human and the machine, the mundane and the extraordinary.
In the paintings the escalators have a likeable humanlike quality as if they too have conformed (like most of us) to their mundane task and configurations. In their case the task of transporting the human ebb and flow in and out of stations, their programming a simple up or down, their destiny to be continuously configured and re –configured like clockwork.
On another level this series of work can be read as a poetic motif for painting itself, the escalators’ set configurations of up and down a metaphor for the journey undertaken in conceiving a painting. The strips of paint marks achieved through the use of tools such as masking tape, razors and cut up cardboard can relate to the countless marks made by the anonymous passengers transported through the stations.
