Aubrey Higgin and The Skin He Lives In
By Luz Hitters
October 2020
My first encounter with Aubrey Higgin (b. 1993, Cheshire) was around five years ago, in Buenos Aires, while he was backpacking through Latin America. A family friend put us in contact so that I could show him around the city. Back then, we went to a classical Argentinian steakhouse where we discussed art and his plans to go both skiing and hiking in the upcoming weeks. After that we lost touch, reencountering for the first time at an exhibition I was co-curating in London. To both our surprise, it was just a couple blocks away from his studio.
The first time I visited his workplace was on a rainy winter day. He is based in a building which houses several artist studios with varied styles. It was such a refreshing scene after the monotonous greyness of London’s central streets. As we entered his room, I was highly impacted by the explosion of colour in his work and the number of pieces he was working on simultaneously. There were colossal paintings full of textures covering every wall.
I asked him what he had been up to these last years and he shared that after we last met, he has been developing his career as an artist. He described his initial practice as a form of escapism: a means to revive quaint memories, creating an idealist reality. Through this therapeutic practice, he could displace the monotony that accompanied the healing following a period of illness.
It is not surprising that Higgin choses vibrant palettes and accentuated textures as the primary expressive tools in his art. Colour, on the one hand, is associated with emotivity. His choice of warmer tones could be related to Higgin’s push for recovery and hopeful character, while the blues, with sadness and longing. On the other hand, the texture accentuates the role of the skin. During sickness, physical pain highlights touch in the more regressive erogenous areas of the body. Consequently, feeling gains a central role in life, as sensibility is enhanced. In Higgin’s case, I believe texture acts as a metaphor of physical contact as a source of pleasure, ache, and a way to understand our limits. His textures remit to touching and being touched, both physically and psychologically.
Aubrey Higgin’s art cannot be separated from his creative process, as his whole performance is a vehicle to introspect. His primary medium is oil painting, which he layers in such a way that it blurs into sculpting. When asked about the choice of materials, he states that oils allow him to reflect on his work and modify it without rushing. To achieve heterogeneous layers, the artist has to wait, or else colours merge into one. Drying cannot be accelerated, and each piece requires months to conclude. As such, his creative process is an ode to patience. Highly inspired by nature, mostly by the British countryside, Higgin embraces the unescapable pace of natural processes. Consequently, he also renders visible our lack of control over reality in the larger scale of things.
In the process of self-discovery, the artist initially departed from familiar sources of guidance. Impressionism is an observable source of influence in Higgin’s early work as landscapes are a recurrent theme. He also includes hints to Gerhard Richter’s abstract paintings. However, as his search develops, he shows a more authentic character, re-purposing tradition and searching for his own language. He includes three-dimensional shapes and ‘bubbles’ to create random patterns. These symbols allude to his past experiences, where he had to accept the unexpected. He seeks out a balance between control and chaos, giving prominence to chance.
His textures and layers also recall Bram Bogart’s work, characterised by loose and dense shapes of accumulated paint that challenge the definition of the medium. Like Bogart, Higgin questions the division between harmony and disruption. The size of the works plays a major role in their impacting character. Large canvases act as a surface for a cathartic explosion of energy. The end result, from a distance, is an abstract outburst of shapes and colours that suggest natural scenes. However, as you approach the work closer, these suggestive shapes are lost in the materiality of the oil. Each brushstroke becomes a scar in the canvas, exposing the fragility of the work. Their tempting sensorial nature challenges viewers not to interfere and instead reflect. Viewers may only observe the complexity of their composition, and speculate on what is behind.
The performative character of Higgin’s paintings suggests an active effort to leave the pain behind. He separates his practice into two parts: an initial aggressiveness, followed by a meditative approach. During the first phase of painting, the artist faces the emptiness of the canvas cathartically, in an almost violent way. He aims to confront the white, the lack of idea. Mirroring the attack his body experienced during his illness, and the cluelessness he initially faced, he uses this stage to process the traumatic. As such, he explores a more voracious approach to the world. However, after the initial discharge of energy, Higgin shifts his relationship with the work to a more romantic one. He slowly layers textures in an organised process, considering whether to modify them or not as time passes. During this stage, the artist allows his most vulnerable aspects to flourish. He gives in to his fragility and powerlessness, subverting the toxic masculinity embedded in British culture. By doing so, he leaves behind the narrow expectations of a traditional society and looks for an authentic and contemporary voice.
Ultimately, when analysing Higgin’s body of work in-depth, the concept of escapism seems paradoxical. The creative process confronts him with existentialist questions that explore the complexity of reality. Through painting, the artist explores his entity in an unjudged and unpressured way. He proves that self-discovery cannot be accelerated nor simplified. As he lets his guard down, the artist encounters his essence, and invites us to do the same.
