Ingeminate
[Ingeminate: to repeat or reiterate for emphasis]

Each day Ronnie Hughes visits the studio, he becomes immersed in small, generally repetitive, tasks; adding, extending, masking, covering, obscuring, filling in, building, destroying, amending. ‘There is a lot of doing and often a lot of thinking,’ the artist says, ‘staring, pondering, imagining, ruminating. If I’m lucky the doing and thinking coalesce occasionally into a flow state. More often than not all this thought and action adds up to failure.’ The failures are pushed and pushed and pushed until at some point their promise starts to condense and eventually, with luck, an autonomous painting appears. ‘You could say I don’t know what I’m doing – and that’s generally what I’m aiming for.’

Over the past few years the paintings have taken a small number of elements and developed these over time until a larger and more complex entity, or ‘state’, has been formed: ‘The works tend to evolve over a long time period and are generally process-driven to the extent that I don’t plan or, in most cases, have any sense of the outcome until the works get close to completion. My role is to steer and nuance their evolution; to balance the elements and, just as often, to disrupt them.’ During the working process the elements proliferate; they are transmuted, grown, developed, aggregated and extended. This typically results in the emergence of waves, nebulae, constellations, lattice structures and fields.  He’s interested in finding something new each time and there’s always a dialogue between accident and deliberation, between habit and invention.

In the larger universe what appears to be random or chaotic actually tends to contain a hidden template, structure or pattern. Conversely regimented order seems to be constantly gnawed at and undermined. That dialogue fascinates Hughes and through the work he’s interested in exposing these unseen forces, the things that lie beneath appearance. The physical act of making a painting is for him a quest to extract a veiled or hidden reality.

This recent work is about nature, then, not landscapes or ecology, but forces like gravity, energy, entropy, emergence.
Born in Belfast in 1965, Ronnie Hughes studied at the University of Ulster, Belfast, receiving an MA in Fine Art in 1989. Hughes has had numerous solo exhibitions throughout Ireland and beyond (including Butler Gallery, Goethe Institute, Hugh Lane Golden Bough, MAC Belfast, Molesworth Gallery, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Pulse Miami, Rubicon Gallery, Sirius Arts Centre, Steve Turner Los Angeles) and has participated in many group exhibitions worldwide.

In 2017 Strange Attractors, a large survey exhibition of his recent work, received a major Arts Council grant to tour the Model Sligo, Limerick City Gallery and the RHA Dublin. The show was accompanied by an extensive publication which included texts by Martin Herbert and Joanne Laws.

Hughes’ work has been written about extensively and he has received a multitude of awards including residencies at PS1 New York, Banff Arts Center Canada, Bemis Arts Center Nebraska, the Albers Foundation in Connecticut and the Vermont Studio Center.

Hughes’ work is held in many public and corporate collections, including both Irish Arts Councils and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.  He has lived in County Sligo since 1995 where he lectures at ATU Sligo.