Hugh Davies

With nearly three dozen one person and group exhibitions to his credit in major galleries and museums throughout Britain, France, Germany, Australia and the United States, Davies’ provocative, haunting images have been widely acclaimed in myriad reviews and articles. An acknowledged master of his craft, Davies received his Master of Fine Arts from the Chelsea School of Art, and was selected for membership in The London Group and appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

In discussing his work, the artist states:
It is the perennial that interests me, rather than the temporary. I see the history of art and representation in the same way as Borges who wrote that "it may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given to a handful of metaphors." For me art is the combination of individual experience and collective ideas – very much "a handful of metaphors" given "different intonations."

The figures in my work, male and female, are derived from a wide range of sources and reference, often from drawings made directly from a particular nude figure, sometimes myself, my partner or models. They are seldom portraits and are for the most part impersonal and generalized to some degree, thus allowing me to distance myself from the image and, crucially, to avoid a specific narrative. Their ambiguous presences, rather than individual characters, inhabit an imaginary, idealized landscape of ruins and cypresses heavy with thoughts of the warm South. Like the fragments of classical antiquity, the figures are deliberately fragmentary but are placed in contradictory spaces, superimposed on other physical surfaces, of walls or vases, thus heightening the sense of uncertainty. The vases and towers are also echoes of former grandeur which are intended to represent all that is left of the status and significance which art enjoyed when it occupied center stage in the cultural register, a status now lost to other media. Like objects once imbued with greater relevance, they address the viewer from the past.

It is my objective to try to use the figure and the circumstances in which it is depicted as metaphors for my ideas about time and history on the one hand, and painting itself on the other. The images are, I hope, a dialogue between the suggestiveness and ambiguity of the content and the physical facts of the medium and the process. I hope to approach the former by creating a symbolic mood or atmosphere, one which is replete with time in the sense that it carries echoes of the classical past, recalls the sultry dreams of romanticism and suggests that time of late evening when the clear outlines and certainties of day begin to drift into shadow and a languid sense of doubt pervades. In short, I want to locate the images between the tangible and the elusive.