Hugh Mendes - An Existential Itch 2001-2008
Hugh Mendes
Fri 11 Jul 2008 - Sat 23 Aug 2008
Hugh Mendes started to collect scraps of newspaper in order to paint them as still lifes during his MA. Some he would buy, some he would find, some lift here and there from cafes, or wherever. All about him lay raw material: snippets of history, with images attached, to paint. He started making work for his graduation show, which was scheduled for 9 September, 2001. On one occasion, while walking along Brick Lane, he found a section of an Arabic newspaper that featured a picture of a guy, turbaned and wrapped in cloth, pointing a gun at some unseen target. He painted this anonymous, menacing figure, then juxtaposed this with a portrait of George Bush along with the headline, ‘So Gore did really win Florida’. For Mendes, the juxtaposition meant that, by winning the election, however fraudulently, his prize was the ominous figure on the other panel of the diptych. The two faced each other, opponents in some unknown battle. Then came the events of the 9/11 and all at once this picture, which to Mendes had no specific, historical meaning, became ubiquitous. In the aftermath of the events, it became clear that the gun-toting man was Osama Bin Laden. He subsequently made a series of paintings based on the events of that day, and featured them in his first solo show ‘Into Manhattan’s Memory’, in November 2001.
What came to be called the ‘War on Terror’ is one of the four categories, some overlapping, that Mendes has pursued over the past seven years: The events of 9/11, the march of science and especially cloning, obituaries, and stories related to the art world. And yet, among the strongest works hovers above all four categories, offering a comment on them all. Titled simply World News, it depicts the tangled, fleshy jaws and gnashing teeth of two dogs engaged in ferocious combat. With vivid simplicity and directness, the painting reveals the banality of violence we find depicted everyday in the newspaper. World News always features war, combat, bloodiness, and the painting illustrates our appetite for everything ‘red in tooth and claw’, as Tennyson characterized nature, despairingly. If there is a hint of resignation in this stance, I think that’s true: this is a strangely deadpan picture. But Mendes brings his own intensity to his project. He sees the work as having a critical function, and wants to recuperate these newspaper images in order to re-present them, and so jolt us into reflection.
The obituary paintings, by contrast, have an elegiac calm, and even when Mendes depicts irredeemable villains like Saddam Hussein or Augusto Pinochet, the tone is never mocking. Look at Hussein, for instance, strangely handsome with his full beard and intense glare, or Pinochet, so resplendent in his full military regalia. What one senses immediately when looking at these pictures is the pleasure that the artist took in painting them, as if he takes a keen interest in how these monsters have been depicted in magazines and newspapers, and what the ramifications are of re-presenting them as small canvas tombstones. Keep in mind that Mendes often mixes and matches image and headline: he wants to find the combination with the most friction, the most compellingly ambiguous juxtaposition. Mendes has painted everyone from the Pope, Robert Altman, James Brown, Isabella Blow and an anonymous philosopher to somebody’s pet dogs. Mendes equalises all of these lives suspends them in a new eternity. His pictures offer a kind of resurrection, however modest. Craig Burnett
Hugh Mendes is a British artist living and working in London. Since completing his MA at City and Guilds of London Art School in 2001, Mendes has been making paintings based on newspaper clippings. This exhibition offers a seven year ‘mini retrospective’ and brings together over a hundred of the works for the first time both in the Main Gallery and with an exhibition of his obituary paintings in Gallery Two. Hugh Mendes has exhibited in Tokyo and New York as well as exhibiting extensively in London in both group and solo shows at Hales Gallery, Sartorial Art, Keith Talent and The Foundry. Mendes was awarded the Fresh Artist of the year award in 2003 and has recently curated his 5th exhibition Icon at the Primo Alonso Gallery in Hackney.
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