From New Exhibition at Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown

by Richard Noyce
February 2007
http://www.artwriter.co.uk/page5.htm (viewed August 2008)

This young and well regarded artist works from digital photographs of familar and mundane objects, albeit taken in extreme close-up and from unusual angles. The focus of his exhibition is a new series of paintings, both small and large, of chewing-gum and bubble-gum that has been dropped on hard surfaces and has then adhered to the soles of shoes that, in lifting away from the surface create stretched forms of the discarded gum. What can, in reality be a tiresome interuption to a walk in town is transmuted through Hicks's extraordinarily skilful technique into the creation of some alternative world, reminiscent of science-fiction, geode crystals and even the organic nightmares of Giger's designs for the 'Alien' film series. The larger paintings approach the epic in their effect, while the smaller paintings offer a concentrated glimpse of a strange other world, and in the necessary compression of the painter's vision, achieve an even more powerful effect.

It is refereshing to see an exhibition devoted to painting - that art form that, despite the best efforts of critics and doom-sayers, is not dead, and refuses to die. The power of paint remains, shifts focus, changes form but continues to possess the subtle energies and power to cause seismic disturbance in the perception of those who care to see what is going on.