Is this a dream of abstract painting? Is this soft furniture to sleep on or inside of? Or perhaps an anti-architecture nightmare, claustrophobic and all consuming, filling up your space as you gaze across a painterly horizon. James Hyde's Aircushion 2001 is a huge inflatable painting as big as a room. You could also say it is a very big cushion, a pillow of sorts. Thirdly you could say it is a landscape providing a physical and sensorial experience. Maybe this means that Aircushion is a functional abstract landscape painting?

Where does painting exist? What form can it take? What can it perform? James Hyde has asked these questions many times in his painting over the last decade and the questioning has led to the containment of paint within glass boxes, producing frescoes on polystyrene, paintings as handles, barriers, mobiles, glowing coffee tables, shelves, carpets, chairs, cubicles and cushions. Whilst Hyde has pursued a number of functional and non-functional sites, which could be classed as furniture, sculpture or photography, he has always resolutely produced paintings.

Where Hyde may have been pursuing the breakdown of divisions between art and design, painting and sculpture, image and object, function and non-function throughout the nineties Aircushion exists as a complete unified experience, acknowledging that divisions no longer exist. The properties of the artwork are no longer contested or in opposition. This unifying of Hyde's Mobile indexing of abstraction appears as if Hyde triggered a reflex action in painting itself. The inflated cushion growing to fill the space could be seen as a safety mechanism of painting to provide itself with both the maximum potential of the given space and a soft landing for paintings long purported fall.

Hyde's gesture is still that of painting, containing all of these combined elements of landscape, ergonomics, abstraction and happy accidents in a natural equilibrium. Aircushion lies in a position of reverie, persisting in a state of rest until affected by another body.

Text & Photography by Gavin Wade 2001