Page 43 - Studio International - September 1973

Malcolm Hughes
(Top left and left)
Four White Reliefs and Environment 1972
48 x 96 in and 8 x 10 x 10ft
(Above)
Maquette for Relief Fig. C1973

contemporary English artist, Malcolm Hughes. counterbalance this stress. perspectival rendering of an invariant scheme),
Malcolm Hughes's environmental work, We have therefore an interesting similarity and finally the code of luminosity, which is not
exhibited in the 'Systems' group exhibition to the interlocking orders which I noted in the fixed (as in Cotman) but operates at the same
which was inaugurated at the Whitechapel etching by Cotman. What I termed the time within strict limits in the environmental
Gallery in March 1972, is obviously of a quite `architectural order' in Cotman — the original situation. Can we proceed from this point to a
different scale and type to the work which was `plan' — is reflected in Malcolm Hughes's work phenomenological reading of the space in the
discussed previously. Partly because of this, but in the 'basic number structure' which informs same way as we read Cotman's Crypt in terms of
also for other reasons which will become clear at the preliminary drawings. The work offered to the connotations of cellar and church ? It seems
a later stage, the critical concepts must be our perception embodies a particular version of to me that we can. But this is not a reading that
applied in what might be called an interrogative this basic number structure, in which elements is given to us as directly as the earlier, precisely
sense. They themselves become a way of reduplicate with and cancel out one another in identified example. It comes all the same,
questioning the work, and of assessing its much the same way as the perspectival perhaps, from an attentive study of the terms
relation both to pictorial tradition and to the rendering of Cotman causes an interruption which Bachelard employs in La Poétique de
more general fields of semiological investigation. of the columnar order. Finally, just as l'Espace — in the first place, his notion of the
In the first place, it is clear that the work Cotman introduces a further imponderability `Dialect of the Outside and the Inside' (p. 94):
yields itself particularly to formal analysis in into the structure by the provision of a light `Before all else, we must establish that the two
terms of the overlap of codes, despite the fact source, so Malcolm Hughes reinvests his terms: outside and inside pose, in metaphysical
that the four panels surrounding the cubic space thematic scheme with additional variants by anthropology, problems which are not
offer no direct illusion of three-dimensional introducing the element of relief and therefore symmetrical. To render concrete the inside and
interplay between a vertical and a slightly of strongly accented light and shade. vast the outside are, it would seem, the first
diagonal accent. The vertical accent is not There are thus three duplicating codes which tasks of an anthropology of the imagination...'
emphasized in the work, although it is in fact are reconciled in the works under consideration. Malcolm Hughes's work, in so far as it
present in the central section as well as being It would be inadequate to consider Malcolm consists of four panels facing inwards, poses
implicit in the strong verticality of the extreme Hughes's work without taking into account all the problem of the 'inside'. But it does not
edge of the relief. By contrast, the diagonal three of them: the 'basic number structure', the rigidly separate off the categories of inside and
gives angular tension to each panel, though the particular embodiment of the basic number outside: it is permeable — open at all four
effect of the recurrent vertical motifs is to structure (comparable to a particular corners, and therefore avoiding the particular
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