MetroParadisiac
19 October – 19 November 2006
Justin Hibbs’ paintings of outmoded, modernist, social architecture in blocks of paired-down, muted tonalities look to occupy the space between a real and an imaginary ideal - somewhere close to the psychological charge of a future state that never quite arrived. In 2004 this found its expression in a study of four paintings of the ill-fated Tricorn Centre, Portsmouth - opened 1966 and designed by the Owen Luder Partnership. These paintings marked a high point of austere realism in Hibbs’ work, after which he embarked on subtler variations.
MetroParadisiac is an imaginary urban sensibility, through it Hibbs’ looks toward a fiction and, in turn, an abstraction inherent within the architectural subject matter of his paintings. Less concerned with empirical confrontation, the paintings demonstrate an underlying organic method of organisation, as if reversing the process from a random geometric order to a design-base visionary blueprint. Many parts of the paintings eschew formal pictorial principles whilst much of the shuttering-like paintwork assimilates a type of building construction technique.
Hibbs’ is primarily looking for an emotional content and sensitivity in the rhythms and forms of his imagery, and this has led him to a place where much of the imagery empties out in unexpected and serpentine ways. As Hibbs’ becomes more and more the author of their imaginary content, the paintings become less to do with the structures they explore, or the ideology behind them, than the patterns and medium they describe in elliptical configurations.
Paradisia 2006
Oil on board,
80 x 66cm
North West 2006
Oil on board,
40 x 33cm