Hugh Ford

Overview

Some comics like sound. They paint themselves with frantic lines of motion, bombastic shockwaves and large-lettered noises. Others have none of that. They draw out silent scenes trapped at the moment of action, the sound effects left to your ready imagination and all the louder for emerging from such silent tableaus. Hugh Ford's paintings draw on that second tradition. Sound drawn only from their incongruous titles, his images draw out moments of life and near-life fantasy raucous with vibrant visual noise. In his first solo Sydney exhibition in some time, Ford brings his silent cacophony to life in the Ian Dawson Gallery on Oxford Street.

The pictures seem incomplete at first. Colours settle along the background of the canvases, highlighting, wandering and embracing the actors of the exhibition. Despite their faceless abstraction, his subjects all shine their fierce and unmistakeable gaze on ambivalently loved dogs, ridden turtles and caught cannonballs. Self-contained, self-assured and surreal, they beg for attention as they look right through you. The images capture frozen moments, and themselves don't seem to hurry to their imminent conclusion. But Ford's exhibition has limited time to it, so hurry in and gaze upon its instants.

Image by Hugh Ford