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Pete Hoida at Ashcroft Modern Art
Is Pete Hoida one of the most important abstract painters of his
generation? Born in Birkenhead in 1944, he was on the London scene
in the 60s and early 70s, and has painted from the hillside of his
isolated Gloucestershire home since 1974. Hoida’s uncompromising
vision of art, and his pursuit of that vision without regard for
changing tastes and fashions, can be daunting to the uninitiated,
and is too easily taken for granted by the initiated. Neither reaction
is justified.
At his recent exhibition of new paintings in Cirencester (September
2006, Ashcroft Modern Art), the immediate impact on each and every
visitor walking into the gallery was the impact of colour: the vibrant,
saturated phenomenology which simply happens to us behind the eyes.
The mediate impact which followed was both conceptual and cultural,
as uninitiated viewers wondered about the intentions and technique
of the artist, and initiated viewers tried to evaluate the paintings
according to formal criteria and historical precedent.
Neither immediate impact nor stock conceptual appraisal will uncover
these artworks. This is because they require input from the viewer,
who must stand in front of them, settle into them, and simply LOOK
for a few minutes at the very least. Otherwise the viewer will not
see the paintings at all; Hoida is in the business of eliciting
temporal experiences, not a quick conceptual fix. He produces colourful
objects which have the potential to cause a carefully controlled
array of experiences in the viewer who runs his or her eyes over
the surface of the canvas. Over time, one shape will eclipse another,
a block of colour will move to the foreground as another recedes
to peripheral vision, and the form that once made sense of the whole
will fall away within a sudden gestalt switch that changes everything,
only to initiate the process all over again until a balance is achieved.
This may be the balance Hoida intended and it may be your own.
The paintings in the Cirencester show ranged upwards in size from
small canvases (approx 50 x 50 cm) to large ones (3 x 1.5 metres).
The small canvases fall into two series. In the first, the title
of one of the paintings, Sweetie, succinctly summed
up the overall mood, with its delicious colours and Braquesque shapes
superimposed. In the second, which includes paintings such as Rosy-fingered
Dawn, and Co their? (Who will say?), there
are psychedelic watery backgrounds on which more heavily textured
blocks of colours have been placed, sometimes interspersed with
avant-garde objets collaged within the paint and with delightful
squiggles of paint from the tube aptly applied.
The larger canvases of the selection were in the main ‘cooler’,
both in the colour tone and fashion sense of the word, with the
blacks, purple and baby blue hues of Lesson on the Flood-tide,
Sobhrach and Sedge-leveller replacing
the hotter reds and greens of Hoida’s last exhibited oeuvre.
A reminiscence of industrial landscape may be evoked in some viewers
by the rust-colour interludes of the natural moor purples. Uisghé
completed the selection perfectly; it was the large canvas which
immediately confronted the viewer in the first room, but it repaid
several visits to take in the forms and effects produced by the
abundant colours on display.
There were also two mid-sized works at Cirencester, Vulcan
and The Return, which are painted in portrait orientation,
and which, while making use of motif and formal structure, avoid
the limitations of the minimalist genre by employing brush marks
and texture to vivid effect. Hoida provides the paintings with their
imaginative titles after they are finished - he is a published poet
- and sometimes the naming takes place after considerable time has
passed. So given the non-representational nature of the paintings,
how are they named? This is a question often asked of Hoida, and
yet there is no particular mystery. The answer is: in the same way
that pieces of music, almost always abstract, are named with imaginative
titles such as ‘Epistrophy’ or ‘Straight, No Chaser’.
At a studio pre-view of works to be shown in the forthcoming exhibition
at Stroud, I noted that the cool theme in Hoida’s current
works continues, extending as far as the almost black canvas of
Big Red Obscured. She moves through the
Fair and Wild and Sweet Foil, Change of all Objects
Carry, indicate yet another new direction in Hoida’s
work, in which patches of bare canvas are permitted to ruminate
behind the cool, sketchy, and soft patches of paint which bind and
balance across the whole. Big Chrysanth. Man may
well steal the show on both first and subsequent impressions, for
the vibrant colours employed amply repay sustained reflection; the
viewer should soon be able to make inroads into the structure of
this major composition.
Hoida’s painting is in the modernist tradition. The art of
past masters such as Goya, Braque, Matisse, Hans Hofmann and Patrick
Heron inform his painting to the core: Hoida paints with what Gadamer
called wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein (‘effective-historical
consciousness’), that is, a consciousness of the past which
actively informs present behaviour. However, the viewer does not
need to know anything about the artists who have influenced Hoida.
In the same way, the undeniable influence of landscape upon his
work does not need to be grasped by the viewer. A certain tradition
in art and the natural landscape have already been effective in
the production of the painting, and so fall away as necessary comparables
once the painting is extant. The result is laid out on the canvas
and the viewer is free to enjoy it.
© Dr Cedari Ray
September 2006
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Delibar
"Then I was back in the McLean exhibition again, and this
time Paul Tonkin came up and said there was an exhibition in the
Delibar in Charterhouse Street I should see. It was paintings
by Pete Hoida, someone I'd never heard of. Tonkin said he was
good and I should go, so the next day I did because I took him
seriously.
It turned out to be a coffee bar I'd been in earlier on that very
day of the McLean opening, pitching an idea for a book to some
publishers. I'd noticed the art and thought it was the abstract
version of the paintings you often get in bars and restaurants.
The figurative paintings are usually big-breasted, big-eyed, charcoally
nudes; maybe with a flame-red Fez as a flash of colour or a bit
of cobalt blue wine bottle. The abstract version is usually sweet
coloured misty amorphous blob things. But I'd noticed that these
paintings weren't bad. I just hadn't thought about it any more
or bothered to look closer, because I was busy and it was only
a coffee bar. If anything, I noticed there were a couple of characteristics
that marked them out in a negative way for me; one was a type
of mark made by squirting acrylic from a plastic container. The
worms of paint seemed out of scale with the rest of the object.
They made a gross effect. Another mark I automatically rejected
was a kind of pat or dab of gel-thickened paint that seemed too
much like cake mixture or at any rate something from cooking,
something that just stood on the surface as if waiting to be spread
out.
When I looked again today, I still rejected these marks, but now
I was unsure what the reason was, if it was just a prejudice.
The paint was applied in ways that got a lot out of a little.
There was a great range of little effects, all of them pleasurable.
The colours were odd and off, like suntan or baby blue or cream
and yellow or speckled brown and yellow. But it wasn't horrible,
but earthy and realistic, or realistic to the spirit of lyrical
or lovely or moody feeling that everyone has had from the landscape
at some time. The ethos or mood or proposition of the show seemed
to be that nature and the visual world are good, and abstract
swathes of paint can stand for this experience. I think it's a
good idea and I look forward to when it comes around again as
an art fashion."
Matthew Collings, Modern Painters, Spring 2000
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Four Gloucestershire Artists, Axiom
Arts Centre, Cheltenham
Pete Hoida relinquishes drawings altogether and
uses the textural and chromatic energy of thick paint to give
his pictures their peculiar light, space and vitality. In his
Light at Whale Wharf for example, a densely packed surface
of thick swathes of paint generates its own hidden space across
the Axiom's spacious gallery. Reminiscent of Hitchens in his most
lyrical and earthy mood, Hoida has a good touch and feel for movement,
and his work has a tactile as well as purely visual or cerebral
effect.
Peter Davies, Art Review, February 1986
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SE1 Gallery
Living
and working in remote rural Gloucestershire since the mid seventies,
Pete Hoida's rich, uncompromisingly painterly work has been too
little seen in London over the years so this new show of recent
work (SE1 Gallery) is especially welcome. Marrying an abstract
distinctly English landscape sensibility that draws on Heron and
Hitchens with the the fierce transatlantic colourism of Hans Hoffman
and de Stael's velvety tachism, Hoida arrives at an intensely
personal synthesis, resonating with landscape feeling.
THUMBNAILS
Nicholas Usherwood, Galleries Magazine, May 2008
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