I knocked. Then without waiting to be asked I went in.

Shara Hughes: I knocked. Then without waiting to be asked I went in.

Curated by Marta Casati

There are paintings born only with the purpose of decorating walls. There are others destined for primordial purposes that would like to reach high peaks but, due to technical insufficiency and lack of procedural autonomy, they end up being furnishing accessories for bored living rooms.

Then there is a third kind.

Their technical structure was conceived to satisfy the tension to the miracle. The event takes place and it is no longer necessary to give definitions or to be satisfied with the function of “decoration”: one has only to rely on its prodigy.

Shara Hughes was born Atlanta in 1981. It is essential to emphasize this in the first instance. It will be easier to understand the mature and personal safety of his pictorial system.

Metroquadro, the new exhibition space in Rivoli developed on three floors, hosts the first Italian solo show of the American artist.

On display is a selection of about ten mixed works on paper of small and medium format and made in recent years (2008) and three works of oil on canvas. “Hughes’ environments do not resemble or recall photographic images extrapolated from furniture magazines”, writes Marta Casati in the critical text in the catalog, “The concatenation of structural events is added element with element to unite in a complete, circular, almost managed structure from a privileged 360 ° view. It is as if the viewer’s eye were given the power to store the completeness of the perspective in front of him in the pinhole of his ocular apparatus “. My pictorial process is based on a controlled spontaneity. Sometimes I plan the whole painting before starting and everything goes smoothly. However, this rarely happens as I never know exactly what will happen. Other times I happen to have a specific idea or object to start with. This could be a wall, a painting, a chair, or a particular combination. In this way the rest of the painting revolves around that particular, explained Shara Hughes during the interview.