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Patrick Hourihan
Surrealist Painter
Sighted humans tend to rely on visual perception above all other senses, but what you get is not always what you see. Birds navigate the world through geomagnetic perception, rays through electro-perception, bats by echolocation. Patrick Hourihan sees everything, but not with his eyes: his paintings and drawings come to us through another perceptual system altogether, in which the organs of sight his and ours are head, heart and sleeping hands. The automatic drawings from which these paintings derive are not only convulsive visual flashes but also bodily spasms, aural circuits, vocal planes; the paintings themselves are excavations, prolongations, of ecstatic states where time is suspended and space is infinite. They show the world as it really is, and are truer than our own eyes.
SLAG ( Surrealist London Action Group)
Seeing Blindness
The work of Patrick Hourihan
Looking and seeing are two totally divorced notions in the art of Patrick Hourihan. His tortuous forms are clearly sentient and reach beyond themselves. We see all the signs of life - flapping, straining tendrils, anthropomorphic silhouettes, pointing hands, facial expressions. But, the illusion is soon broken. What may be taken for faces are mere masks, hands and limbs are those of marionettes, growing vegetation is elaborate fabric, woven and pleated with all the embellishment of a Renaissance gown. The allusion to life is mere chimera. We are placed on a vivid, but moribund stage. As in a theatrical setting, there is a simulation and posturing. Life and reality are pointed at without ever being attained. What appears to feel and touch is devoid of senses, what appears to look is divested of sight. This is a vision of cadavers and obliterated animation.
Yet, we are not wholly in the domain of the spectral. Patrick Hourihan does not create a withering cosmos. On the contrary, his vision is vibrant and vigorous. Lush shapes stretch across space and intertwine with figures that offer opposition and confrontation. There are scenarios of drama and interrelation, albeit of a tortuous kind. We are confronted with scenes of anguish. The undertones are those of panic, claustrophobia, apprehension. emotions and responses that belong to a vital reality. However, this is not the reality we know. It is the reality of elsewhere, as André Breton had written in 1924 in his Manifesto of Surrealism. As a form of reality, it possesses its own messages. Within the similitudes of the vegetal and the biomorphic, the occasional signal emerges, an ocular aperture may timidly glisten. It beckons in a way that signifies life. It is communicating and reaching out. There is a message, but it is a message that will not only never be understood, but also one that can never be perceived. Hourihan paints a world that exists in parallel to our own, a world from which cryptic signs are emitted, which cannot, as yet, be decoded. He conjures up a separate reality that is straining in vain towards our own. His world has eyes and hands, but these are eyes that look without seeing and hands that touch without feeling. It is a world of seeing blindness.
Silvano Levy
Silvano Levy has published extensively on surrealism, with studies on René Magritte, E.L.T. Mesens and Paul Nougé. His research on the surrealist group in England began with a film on Maddox and the book Conroy Maddox: Surreal Enigmas (1995), while a wider interest in the movement led to the publication of Surrealism: Surrealist Visuality (1996, 1997) as well as Surrealism (2000). Levy has curated national touring exhibitions of the work of Maddox and Desmond Morris, and published a monograph on the latter entitled Desmond Morris: 50 Years of Surrealism (1997), followed by the enlarged re-edition Desmond Morris: Naked Surrealism (1999) and Desmond Morris: Analytical Catalogue Raisonné 1944-2000 (2001). Dr Levy is a senior lecturer at Keele University, England.
Even better than the surreal thing
Camden New Journal
Patrick Hourihans colourful and humorous paintings are the product of an outsiders rich imagination, writes Fiona Green
I NEVER knew that my early love for Lewis Carrolls Alice in Wonderland would one day lead me to the door of such a fine
Surrealist painter. Patrick Hourihans glittering array of pictures, paintings and drawings currently being exhibited at the
Highgate Gallery, reveal that the essence of Surrealism is still alive and that Hourihan is the remarkable torch bearer.
Patrick has been working virtually unknown for more than 20 years at the service of his imagination, automatically painting as he
describes it. Raised in an unconventional setting apart from, yet in daily contact with his mother Patrick didnt mix well with other
children. His imagination was fed on the literature of Lewis Carroll and the classics, and left to develop unfettered by early
schooling. He never wanted to be part of the mainstream of life, but enjoyed looking at it from the outside. So it was a delight for him to encounter Michael Werner at Watford College, where he went to study art in the mid 1980s.
Michael (or Baron Werner von Alvensleben) was a refugee from Hitler and a serious, dedicated artist. He was quite unique and had known many of the great Surrealists in Europe. To Patrick he was also a wizard who saw the wonder of the marvellous behind everyday objects and situations, although he could also on occasion be a sacred monster too. Before he met Michael, Patrick says his work was stuck in some way, but then he learned to value himself and now he works alone, trusting and entirely at the mercy of his own instincts.
The paintings are always hidden while in progress, because he doesnt want anyone to intrude before completion. It is not unusual to have more than one on the go over a long period. Like the sculptor Louise Bourgeois, whose magnificent show at Tate Modern he visited recently, Patrick does not paint for an audience, but for himself alone.
He found fans in Conroy Maddox, who bequeathed some fine Surrealist work and papers to him, and George Melly who wrote the introduction and opened his show a decade ago.
Melly, an expert on the subject, described Patrick as an instinctive Surrealist not a resurrectionist and drew comparison with the Dadaists of 1916 artists like Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia whose subject matter shows machinery with vegetation.
In fact, Melly says, the Surrealists disliked machinery (except for cinema which Man Ray, Bunuel and Cocteau used to great effect) but whenever it appeared, as in the Max Ernst series, it is attacked and overwhelmed by lush vampiric vegetation. They are the sources in these paintings, imbued with unnatural colour like strange dreams.
Patrick is a wonderful colourist and humorist, whose work demonstrates that by turning chaotic feeling into orderly metaphor, via pure psychic automatism, the spring of personal freedom is found in the unconscious mind.
• The Spirit of Surrealism: Painting by Patrick Hourihan is at the Highgate Gallery from January 11-24.
020 8340 3343
• Fiona Green is an artist and psychotherapist
Unknown Things
The work of PATRICK HOURIHAN
It is impossible for me wrote André Breton, founder and leader of the Surrealist Movement, to envisage a picture as being other than a window and my first concern is then to know what it looks out on
Patrick Hourihan is a young painter whose work takes place through the window and yet, in so far as I can tell, he has very little knowledge of Surrealism and is unaware of Bretons conditional description. His is an instinctive surrealist, not a resurrectionist.
His two sources of imagery appear at first confrontational: machinery and vegetation. Neither element is unknown to 20th Century Art. The Italian Futurists celebrated machinery; its power, speed, even its noise. Hourihan doesnt do that at all. He is, if anything, closer to the Dadaists of 1916-1924 who invented useless machinery to satirise a world in the process of mechanisation; a development in which every human activity, including love-making no especially love-making would be replaced by technology, a dehumanisation of the human-spirit.
The masterpiece of this po-faced mockery was Marcel Duchamps huge glass The Bride stripped naked by her Bachelors; a vast calculated nonsensical monument to frustration. Picabia too, Duchamps friend, painted a fragment of machinery, all wheels and pistons, with the title a little girl born without a mother, and of course its true. No machine can reproduce a replica of itself yet!
A favourite photograph of the Surrealists showed an old steam-railroad engine which had broken down and been abandoned in a lush tropical forest. While still retaining its shape it is entirely throttled by vines and creepers. In fact, in general, the Surrealists disliked modern machinery (only the cinema escaped their censure) and whenever it appears, as in Max Ernsts series of Garden Airplane Traps it is attacked and overwhelmed by lush vampiric vegetation.
In Hourihans world this is not the case at all. The mechanical and the vegetable are allies aiming at our discomfiture. Creepers and vines writhe and entwine around steel and iron to reanimate them, to provide vegetal sinew and muscle for metal bones.
Besides, his machines are never computerised, miniaturised, birdy-chirping creatures controlled by silicon chips. His machinery is unwieldy, outmoded, rusting amongst nettles, lying dormant in abandoned workshops. Vegetation has whispered in its ear, preached sedition and so be as it comes, reassembled, grinding, rattling and intertwined with its sedititious green anarchic will to move again.
These pictures, precise as engineers blue-prints, seductive in colour, disquieting in their obstinate refusal to yield to comforting logic, are the work of someone outside fashion or the comforts of cynicism and deconstruction. PATRICK HOURIHAN knows, or to be more precise, is at the service of his own mind, his own imagination.
George Melly
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