Phill Hopkins – Some Paintings with a Figure and some without

Phill Hopkins
Some Paintings with a Figure and some Without
11th June till 2nd July 2022

“O mundo tem a cor dos nossos olhos.” (The world has the colour of our eyes.)
Teixeira de Pascoaes

Phill Hopkins’ pictorial work is developed on the substantial premise of integrating the natural processes of the mirror of visible nature in the transformative plastic core of the artistic idea of ​​the work. The revealed, verified nature, integrated in the conceptualization of the work-making, allows an empirical verification that the artist captures, through mental strategies or technical reproduction, as in the case of photography that the artist uses as support of aprioristic modalities of intention later transferred to the canvas, to the exempt space, as tabula rasa, ideal servant for the transmission of the immaterial part to the materiality of the support. The nature evidenced by and in the artwork shows a differentiation, or rather a divergence concerning the purely mimetic survey, of exact or reliable reproduction of the real retinal qualities. His drawing and painting reveal a radical crossing of the simple observation, of the factual observation that extends around him, being the pictorial elements inserted in the space as poetic intentions of inhabiting the daily life, of bringing out to the surface of the artwork a strange superficial familiarity, which displace the representative image of the landscape, from the captured plane of nature, to a representative beyond, in a reordering domain belonging to the realm of metaphor, of the semantic transference of reality to a sphere of plausibility, of pure possibility.

In the words of the artist “the landscape acts as a mirror, reflecting patterns in myself, inviting and allowing me to make intimate physical and emotional connections.” These connections serve as a mediation between the creative gesture and the organizing gaze developed by the obtainment of a spatial dispositive way, which, once interconnected, suppose an approach to reality contaminated by the intellectual, emotional, confessional projection of the artist, in a landscape portrait that has so much of a primordial, matrix nature, as a portrait of the artist himself, or of figuration (both present and absent) in a dual approach to the inscription of meaning in the artwork.

Phill Hopkins seems to approach the matter of the world through the artifice of senses, deregulating the established boundaries of what is the generalized tradition of landscape painting, meeting the instant of appearance and its momentary aura through a unique, singular and unrepeatable gesture, consequently crystallized in the artwork, as a lasting portrait of both internal and external belonging to the naturalness of nature.

Nature appears in this way, in the artwork as a multi-mode catalog of experiences, sensations, reminiscences, named for the complex imagery representation whose structuring develops as a deviation from the perspectic figuration and the colour palette legitimized in authenticity. Hopkins’ composition departs from the visible exterior to an inner ontological depth, whose image returns to the surface encoded by the singularity of its conceptual processing.

By Rodrigo Magalhães

PASCOAES, Teixeira de. D. Carlos. Assírio & Alvim, Lisboa. 2010, p.75