For over 100 years, planes have provided a new mode of access to nature, expanding the urban and pastoral alike into dizzying vistas. Henry Hudson’s horizon line reliefs take inspiration from these airborne views of the earth. Precision is inherently hard to capture while flying at hundreds of miles per hour, which Hudson alludes to with his poetic, inexact titles, such as Somewhere Over the Tropic of Cancer (2022). However, these locations are absent from the bright ombre of his reliefs. The reliefs instead hinge on their compelling physicality, an element often missing from the original vistas that inspired Hudson.
When Hudson flies high above the clouds, his identity and individuality appear to slip away, replaced by a sense of nearing a higher power and reaching new horizons. With this fleeting, spiritual quality, Hudson acknowledges both the inherent abstraction introduced by distance and a movement in art since the 19th century toward abstraction in general.Hudson starts his reliefs on an iPad, using the tablet to manipulate images he has taken while airborne. Then he, with the help of assistants, works up surfaces atop aluminum panels using a clay-like substance made of pigment, petroleum jelly, calcium salts, chalk, and dry pigment in polyvinyl acetate. Hudson textures the surfaces with tools, giving them the craggy appearance of some distant alien terrain. The resulting work suggests the 1950s and ‘60s utopian aspirations of the neo-avant-garde, when artists embraced the potential of pure color.
Ontological Spherescapes builds on the idea of a technologized utopia, where technological advancements (like air travel or the use of an iPad) enable new possibilities for the venerable medium of painting. In our current period typified by dystopian outlooks, perhaps this kind of utopianism has relevance as a path to explore deeper ways of being and thinking.