Hugh Mendes: Time Out Exhibition of the Week

There’s a feeling of mournful distance to Hugh Mendes’s work, with his scores of minutely detailed, trompe l’oeil paintings, all depicting clippings of newspaper reports made over the last ten years. 9/11 is the constant touchstone: headlines about the Iraq war, inevitably, but also obituaries about more tangential figures such as Brian Haw, the anti-war demonstrator and Charlton Heston. The sense is of the significance of that momentous day constantly expanding – even as Mendes himself, with his meticulous photorealist style, seems intent on somehow slowing down the ever-accelerating news cycle.

Gabrielle Coxhead. Time Out Sept 2011