KEZ HUGHES REVIEWED IN THE AGE’S WEEKEND PICKS

“For a while Kez Hughes was creating paintings of other artworks and sculptures from ancient and classical periods, but now her focus has enticingly shifted to temperamental landscapes and lightly surreal scenes. Partly inspired by a recent trip to Naples and the volcano Vesuvius, the paintings foremost hold a sense of time: that past moments, like volcanic eruption, linger through history, awaiting excavation in the present. In this sense, we live through the past in Hughes’s paintings. She delivers moments like the splash of raindrops as a person runs through the street in their towel; a horse in the moonlight; a frozen and surprised white cat; a hand touching a shard of glass. There are romantic landscapes that would make famed German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich gasp. The images themselves are important, but so is the collective mood they convey; of things being unsettled and unresolved.” Tiarney Miekus