In 'Tristes Tropique,' Hoey explores ideas which feel most relevant to him based on his experience of living in Brazil which couldn’t be more different than England, his native home.  Since a child, where he grew up on a farm, Hoey has long been fascinated with the images conjured up around the idea of far off lands evoking the promise of adventure and the exotic.  Now living in Brazil, the reality is quite different to those childhood imaginings.  Those idealised images have stayed with the artist, but they are obscured through witnessing the signs of industrial pollution, capitalism, excessive crime, and massive inequality.  These factors are challenging and are intensified against the intoxicating backdrop of the natural beauty of the landscape.

It is this tension that Hoey investigates in his work by bringing together seemingly opposite elements of natural beauty and the scars of human exploitations, the beautiful and the cruel.  These opposites intensify experience.  The beautiful becomes more beautiful, the cruel more ugly and this raises the constant question for the artist; whether one is possible without the other?

The title for this show, Tristes Tropiques is the title from a memoir, first published in France in 1955, by the anthropologist and structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss. It documents his travels and anthropological work in Brazil.

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