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In Andrew Hladky’s paintings, travel brochure photos mingle with art history to form sweeping, alien landscapes. Idealised imagery and the allure of escapism become nightmarish and oppressive as horizon piles on horizon, perspectives twist and change and the world is lit by a multitude of sickly sunsets.
His subject-matter is memory overgrown by the impersonal: sentiment and nostalgia deformed by blank, repetitive process.
Using cocktail sticks to apply neat oil paint in automatic, repetitive gestures, he creates petrified, sculptural landscapes which grow out from the support like pointillism gone mouldy, or like the slow accumulation of mineral deposits.
As a result, the image begins to distort and to break down from any angle but the front. Worms of paint squeezed straight from the tube populate the paintings, often threatening to over-run and destroy the image, and to replace it with a writhing mass of paint.
