ART CITIES:Zurich-Alex Hubbard
Alex Hubbard’s work is investigates the boundaries between video art and painting, exploring each via a cross-examination that invigorates both media in new and inventive ways. . As an example, in “Annotated Plans for an Evacuation” (2009), his video for the 2010 Whitney Biennale, Hubbard covered one side of a car with spackle and spray-paint, ultimately covering its surface completely and rendering the car into a flat surface.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Eva Presenhuber Archive
Constructed along parallel lines, Alex Hubbard’s videos and paintings explore composition, mass, colour and depth of images in unexpected ways. Avoiding a single point of focus, Hubbard constructs his videos in layers, engulfing the viewer with bold colours, performative gestures and evolving, all-over compositions in which movement is multi-directional and time appears to be non-linear., in the frame. In counterpoint to the videos, Hubbard’s paintings often suggest a mechanical means of production. Fields of colour in fibreglass and resin are interrupted with richly pooled, dripped and poured paint. Working with fast-drying materials, such as epoxy and latex, the artist is forced to act quickly, embracing chance happenings and revelling in the autonomy of his chosen media. Both Alex Hubbard’s videos and paintings are created according to a “not so perfect plan”, that is, a plan made to fail. This is foundational to the precarious tension of the crashes and other movements in the videos. His solo exhibition “Chemical Compulsion” is on presentation throughout three ajoining rooms at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich. Two rooms display a new series of seven paintings and are separated by the new video work “Interior I” that is on show on a third room. “In Interior I” Hubbard uses a scene as a constant background on which he projects another layer of schematic motions and a third layer of digitally animated colors. As a background scene, he uses for the first time a figurative scene. It shows a set in which a person, sometimes split to three people, sits in a small corner in front of a dozen computer screens, each emitting LCD light which illuminates the otherwise dark room. The walls are filled with toilet-wall scribble. The person smokes and at one point, starts kicking the screens. In the foreground the video shows a schematic, flipped easel burning. Then it shows the same burning easel projected onto a burning folding movie screen. The background scene is disturbed by the raising smoke and at the end by the spray of a fire extinguisher ending the fire. The third layer blurs the whole video with digitally animated colors. They swell and recede, giving the whole composition the dramatic tension of the former videos yet without their stark physical powers. These colors are reminiscent of a prismatic vision of the LCD-spectrum or of toxic chemicals. They link the video to Hubbard’s new paintings. The paintings range from purple over yellow to red and thus, like the animated colors in Interior I, show the whole spectrum. Two black-and-white paintings link the schematic vision of the burning easel from Interior I to the paintings. Hubbard starts the paintings with a squeegeed spill of tinted urethane onto the linen. Then he applies enlarged stenciled drawings made on paper on the spills and the remaining linen and finishes with another layer of either fiberglass and resin or with more urethane. The original compositions, reminiscent of abstract expressionism, are still recognizable but it’s unclear whether the patches, spills and lines are planned or just traces of failure. The different surfaces, color fields, lines, and materials hint at the breathless and tripping process of their creation.
Info: Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zahnradstrasse 21, Zurich, Duration: 28/10-22/12/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-17:00, www.presenhuber.com
