Chris Hugh Mackenzie on 4 Recent Paintings
Chris Hugh Mackenzie speaks to Omar Kholeif about concepts of impermanence and immobility in 4 recent paintings.
Chris Hugh Mackenzie, Serpentine, oil on linen. Private Collection, UK. Courtesy of the artist.
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The symbol of serpentine roads recurs in my paintings, a reminder of vastness and the permanence of the landscapes that we traverse as beings. There is a beauty of a fine line trailing and looping through wild vasts.
It is perhaps a metaphor of our own pragmatic, altered courses and journeys in life. Serpentine, for me, adopts a simple colour structure of strict separation between wilderness and human adventuring and passage, similar in many ways to a map.
The yellow track, for me, questions whether a path is lit or not. It is an enquiry into how we begin passages—generational, well-trodden, inevitable - to the unknown realm, be they become unrealized or immaterial destinations that live outside of the frame.
Chris Hugh Mackenzie, Visitants, oil on canvas, 80 cm x 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Visitants gave its title to a wider body of recent and in-progress paintings in which I have been exploring human relationships to images, and particularly the role that impermanence plays in configuring the subject and its relationship to its surroundings, as well as those of the viewer within a painting. This is, for me, a painting of arrival, led speculatively by the viewers’ shadows.
Chris Hugh Mackenzie, Rainbound, oil on canvas, 60 cm x 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Rainbound collects memories and thoughts of my family in a Chinese hotel waiting out a rainstorm, paused in time and thought. Plans on hold momentarily. I was drawn to the hotel lobby, as a waiting room, a place of formality. It assumed the sense of a quiet cinema; it’s still visitants passively allowing something external to pass. Their gaze is inward, creating a sense of enclosure. The world beyond, its island and its architecture is another pictorial realm—an abundant and inviting one. A parallel world where the kids shall grow to find their independence, perhaps?
Chris Hugh Mackenzie, Maps and Plans (2026), oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist.
I see this as a pilgrimage to a possible object.
Here, that object is partly an imaginary construct of the spiritual ‘home’
I am drawn to thinking about future generations, specifically how they strategize ways for their happiness. Objects, particularly those artifacts in galleries and museums—leaden with time as much as form, are active sites of inspiration for me.
In Maps and Plans (2026) we see two kids in a picture scrutinizing another picture. It is a mirror, a world, a semblance of self, or merely a plot for something we do not yet know.
Fancy learning more about Chris Hugh Mackenzie and his art? Enter his inner world and home studio in Ayr on our latest episode of the #artPost21 podcast, #StudioVisit.