Bo Hilton is an artist based in Penzance, UK. He studied MA Fine Art at Brighton Polytechnic.
Bo Hilton’s practice deals with the conceptual and poetic possibilities of the medium of painting, in particular those that occur through the processes of making a work.
To weave connections between memory, space and time, Hilton will often begin a work with motifs of the absent or invisible figure, such as specific memories of playing chess with his late father. Minimal gestures, nuanced combinations of colour, the introduction of fragments of other found or remembered images, are repeated strategies that allow his paintings to have their own autonomy and volition. As such the finished paintings often are only subtly imbued with the original motif and idea. Hilton’s approach relies on a process of applying, removing, then re-applying paint in diverse ways until the painting begins to say something as a whole. He believes the painting should work as a whole in terms of colour harmony and balance of forms and is interested in the retinal satisfaction in moving visually around the painting and this is key to the work.
For Hilton, being a painter in a post-medium specific context does not mean conceiving of painting as some sort of outmoded retreat or thinking that the modernist project of the specificity of the medium can or should be rehabilitated. He understands contemporary painting as a site for the making of meaning, as a rich field of memories, obsessions and suggestiveness that can interlock with aesthetic qualities to make an emotional space that is ambiguous. It alludes to figuration but works on the spectator’s nervous system mainly through formal qualities of colour, form and pattern.