Hugo Crosthwaite: Pierogi

Escape Rates Escaparates
16 October - 15 November 2009
Opening Reception: Friday 16 October 2009 7 - 9 pm

Hugo Crosthwaite is a California trained artist (BA from San Diego State University's School of Art, though lives and works in NYC).  He has a complex mix of photo-realistic yet expressive characters that reside in spaces that are themselves a mix of specific localities (taken from photo-references no doubt), icons, abstraction, and just as often empty fields. It looks like he works with charcoal and/or graphite to model the figures and black acrylic paint to fill in the large zones of dark tones, though on reading his materials it seems he accomplishes it all with charcoal and graphite. I wouldn't be surprised if he painted a powdered charcoal for the blacks, as they are very intense.

The characters seem to be involved in different corporeal actions with one another. A reaccuring motif was of one grown character emerging from the crotch of another. This pseudo-birth, reminded me of Odd Nerdrums use of shock imagery, but also of Jenny Saville's tortured portraiture of women. He claims a major influence to be the Tijuana bibles from his birthplace of Mexico (short, often crude and sexually explicit comics). Sexuality and violence do seem to figure strongly in many of his images, though often the images are just juxtaposed in unsettling combinations.


http://www.pierogi2000.com/index.html

PIEROGI | 177 North 9th Street Brooklyn, NY 11211 T. 718.599.2144