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On a blistering 100-degree afternoon in August, the artist Hugo McCloud and I moved through his Brooklyn studio discussing his recent exhibitions and series of works in progress. Hugo McCloud is a young artist whose approach is simultaneously minimal and conceptual, highly suggestive of an interesting emerging talent. |
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Hugo McCloud, Shacks R Us 2012, Patina and mixed media on copper sheet. 104 x 128 x 2.5 in. Courtesy of the artist.
On a blistering 100-degree afternoon in August, the artist Hugo McCloud and I moved through his Brooklyn studio discussing his recent exhibitions and series of works in progress. Hugo McCloud is a young artist whose approach is simultaneously minimal and conceptual, highly suggestive of an interesting emerging talent.
McCloud is a self-taught artist out of Sausalito, California, originally trained in design. He has made himself a successful career operating an atelier with his mother, landscape designer Irene Forster. The artist has developed a highly innovative design studio in Brooklyn, which offers imaginative minimalist furnishings that echo juxtapositions of water, mesh, steel, stone, and copper. His reluctance to quote recent art strategies is perhaps based on this background outside of art and critical theory, allowing the work to grow, independent of these clichés.
McCloud’s three-dimensional canvases are constructed such that their physical texture becomes their content, exploring the essence of making, gesture, and expression. Through a labor-intensive approach to materials, McCloud’s surface textures are loaded with intricate nuances and gradations that create a kind of alchemy of color and form. The result of this highly experimental approach is a series of paintings that suggest complex structures of light and dark.
Embracing gesture-based nuances combined with non-traditional materials, McCloud’s process is highly intuitive, yet serious. The artist appears less concerned with the degree to which his process is evident in the final work. By subverting the original appearance of the source materials through his use of torches, welding, and other means, his use of varied materials is never referential.
McCloud has begun to explore images derived from his background in industrial design. His materials are both found and invented. He recently began to use white commercial plastic bags from India. These bags are burned with a torch and used as a painting layer; the resulting surface presents itself as a radical approach to the traditional painting format.
Often the intrinsic properties of the raw materials he incorporates in his paintings guide his entire artistic process. Through this approach, issues are addressed not only from an aesthetic point of view but also, and foremost, from an organic, ethical, and interactive perspective.
A critical point of entry in his approach is the potential for ambiguity often associated with abstraction and materiality. In his works there is a decisive polemic split between materials and content. While the context of an intentionally undefined private language operates in McCloud’s art resulting in paintings in flux, these loaded painted surfaces are intended to reflect a system of intangible thoughts and feelings.
Recently, McCloud has produced two series of works; one rather pared-down series in which the composition explores subdued tonality of the surface, and another in which highly complex pigmented works reveal a visual recognition and abstraction.
McCloud acknowledges as inspiration for his work the art of several contemporary and modernist artists, including Leonardo Drew, Franz Kline, Mark Bradford, Gustav Klimt, and Rudolf Stingel. The essential element uniting these artists is a subversive and striking approach to process.
Both in approach and temperament, McCloud’s works appear most closely aligned to Stingel, who often challenges ideas of cultural hierarchy, modes of production, and the mythology of the artist. In presenting the suggestion of what might be made rather than a finished canvas, Stingel’s art reveals the power of potential as a radical device with which to approach painting.
McCloud explores an unstable distinction between sculpture and painting. In his new constructions, he aims to allow opposite concepts to coexist: nature and man-made, past and future, wealth and poverty, well-being and drama. His intention is partially to up-end the mediums of painting and sculpture, and in the process create a hybrid of two forms of art. His work is engaged in a redefinition of painting and is indicative of a generation of younger artists whose works continue a commitment to abstraction.
