“Try to look steadily”: experiencing oxymoron with Patrick Hughes

_{“I saw a Line that was no Line; Space that was not Space: I was myself, and not myself. When I could find voice, I shrieked aloud in agony, “Either this is madness or it is Hell.” “It is neither,” calmly replied the voice of the Sphere, “it is Knowledge; it is Three Dimensions; open your eye once again and try to look steadily.””} 

_{–Edward A. Abbott, Flatland}

“Open your eye” is a simple command that can be so difficult in practice. Often, art can encourage its viewer to look at a subject they thought they knew from a new perspective, making them open their eyes to it in a way that they hadn’t before. Few artists do this in a way as well defined as Patrick Hughes and even fewer have trademarked their method. Reverspective – a portmanteau of “reverse” and “perspective” – is a way of making pictures that Hughes developed in the 1960s. It involves painting onto specially made three dimensional surfaces in such a way as to make their voids look like protrusions. Look at a Reverspective work for long enough and the parts of it that recede inwards will begin to stick outwards. To experience this is to perceive empty spaces as objects and, therein, to see a small part of the world in a way that runs counter to your prior understanding.

I visited Hughes’ Shoreditch studio on a sunny June afternoon. I am there to see some new paintings that distil the Reverspective idea into singular objects. “I’m making new shapes,” he tells me as he ascends the stairs from the basement, striking a series of poses with arms and legs outstretched. He takes me downstairs to show me two versions of Die, one of these new works that takes the shape of  an open-ended, concave structure made from three small boards. It is painted white with black spots to look like an inside-out version of its namesake. He stands in front of a mirror (apparently a magician friend recently taught him that this is the best way to practise tricks of perception) with one Die in each hand, slowly rotating them until I, standing behind him, begin to see them not as structures with empty spaces in the middle but as bulging cubes. 

When I first met the artist a few years earlier, we spoke about Flatland: a 19th Century novel about a living Square, who lives in a world composed solely of two-dimensional shapes and lines. When he meets a Sphere, he cannot understand its existence. All of the Square’s experiences up until now have been in two dimensions, so The Sphere - a three-dimensional object - exists beyond the limits of his understanding. The Sphere encourages him to open his mind to the third dimension, repeating the phrase “upward, not northward,” but it is to no avail. The idea of moving up without moving north, along an uncharted dimension, doesn’t fit with the Square’s understanding of the world. Eventually, the Square is transported to Spaceland, a world composed of three-dimensional things, where he comes to understand this third dimension by experiencing it in practice. He returns to Flatland in the hope of educating his countrymen on what he has seen, but they are unable to grasp it. The story ends with the Square, alone in his new point of view, hoping that one day he “may stir up a race of rebels who shall refuse to be confined to limited Dimensionality.”

Fiction is important to Hughes. It might seem natural to think about Reverspective in terms of physics or psychology, the artist tells me that he prefers to do so in a more literary way: in terms of rhetoric. Oxymoron is his favourite rhetorical device, and he recalls these contradictions in terms generously. Their sources range from the sublime to the ridiculous and they variously surprise, delight and unsettle me. On this visit he speaks about “darkness visible”, a term first used by John Milton in his description of hell in 17th-century epic poem Paradise Lost, in the same breath as the floating anchor used in Buster Keaton’s 1921 silent comedy film The Boat. He thinks of Reverspective works as real-life oxymorons: contradictory objects whose existence seems to be logically impossible. They are protruding voids, convex spaces: inwards and outwards at the same time. Like the phrase “darkness visible”, they shouldn’t make sense but somehow do.

To believe a Reverspective work, to experience its voids as protrusions, requires the viewer to ignore the theoretical definitions of the two things and instead rely on their own practical, physical, bodily experience. Understanding the world through experience rather than learned concepts was also the key to the Square’s enlightenment in Flatland. Towards the end of the book, when he finds himself in Spaceland, he looks upon the world that he once understood in two dimensions and notes “how poor and shadowy was the inferred conjecture in comparison with the reality which I now beheld!” The difference between inferred conjecture and beholding reality runs parallel to the difference between theory and practice. Both in the Square’s understanding of Spaceland and in our experience of Reverspective works, the former is not enough. It is, as Hughes tells me while we watch his two Dice dance in the mirror, shifting from concave to convex, spaces to things, physical experience that makes the logical oxymoron of Reverspective possible for the viewer. You must, as the Sphere instructs the Square, “open your eye once again and try to look steadily.”