Comfortably numb

Hugpat, whose real name is Patrick Hugues, was born on June 21, 1972 in Marseille, and lives and works in the Phocaean city. "My parents wanted me to go to Math Sup, but I wanted to go to Beaux-Arts", Patrick remembers. The compromise was finally found in architecture. Nudes, urban ensembles, charcoal, pen and ink, pastels, Da Vinci, Dürer... The young student has a boundless admiration for the classics and their techniques. He draws and sketches incessantly: "For my eighteenth birthday, I asked for a return trip to Amsterdam to visit the Van Gogh retrospective. I spent eight hours in the museum, I couldn't have been given a better gift."

After graduating at the age of 25, the young man from Marseilles set up his own business. His practice of drawing and illustration are then put between parentheses. But the need to sketch suddenly reappeared in his life. Promising, a first series of drawings with black felt pen is born. The first compositional milestones are set. Abandoned harbors, warehouses, frozen cranes: one can then see vast disoriented urban ensembles. At first disembodied, his works will slowly become populated. The time of the large formats is felt, and the artist moves his action on the canvas. Fires, gas masks, scenes of riots or urban violence... The tormented and cathartic dimension dominates. Just like the respect of the figuration, inherited from his many years of architectural practice.

Always in black and white, the painter works in shades of gray, in layers of washes and successive glazes. Raw and violent, the red also invites itself in his works. There is some Bilal and Bacon in Patrick Hugues's gesture. Antoine d'Agata, H.R. Giger or Druilet are also not far. The man, who is still experimenting a lot, then crosses paths with the Marseilles artist Skunkdog. Between the two painters, the link is solidly woven. In contact with Skunkdog, Patrick broadens his palette. Skunkdog takes him towards the coulures, the work with the spray, the posca markers. After a first series called "Noir", highlighted in the gallery "L'Appartement", Patrick Hugues made another major encounter in the person of David Pluskwa. For the gallery owner, who currently includes the best of Marseille's avant-garde in his catalog, Patrick's works are unmissable and welcome.

"What's next? I think my vast urban ensembles are going to get populated. And more and more. It is towards this type of composition that I am heading, I feel it" confides the painter. "My paintings are vast windows where chaos reigns. Painting is a struggle. But a necessary struggle. The time that this energy, this instinctive need, will express itself through my gesture, my work will advance." Amazing century. Capable of starting great fires as well as seeing the birth, here and there, of neo-romantics, the last to carry the light. Patrick Hugues is one of them. Théophile Pillault - Marseille, 2016.