For his solo exhibition at YYZ, Daniel Hutchinson has produced a series of site-sensitive paintings with coloured fluorescent light components under the title Paintings for Electric Light.
Seeking contingency rather than autonomy and emphasizing the primacy of perceptual experience, these pictures are produced considering carefully composed external relationsthe gallery’s architecture and the relative positions of pictures and lightsand the moving spectator who perceives new conditions at every spatial location. The internal compositions of the paintings are geometric patterns that draw formal cues from the light fixtures, as well as the shapes of the supports, and the shapes of the cast light or shadows inside and outside of the picture plane.
These paintings for electric light continue the artist’s interest in the mtier of painting, the tradition of the monochrome, and the interactivity of retinal opticality, but depart from the critical relationship to pictorialism his paintings have always maintained. Representing a completely new approach to painting for the artist, these works embrace the necessity of total non-objective abstraction and sculptural relationships.
Documentation By: Allan Kosmajac
Essay
A Field Without Origin / Notes on Paintings for Electric Light by Craig Rodmore
These paintings, which are for coloured electric light, are not paintings of anything, and with the abandonment of the subject (architectural, natural) that had persisted in Hutchinson's work until now, perspectival space within the painting is displaced by compositions based on an isometric grid whose size is determined by that of the brush that will be used.
Artist Bio
Daniel Hutchinson
Daniel Hutchinson is a visual artist based in Toronto, Ontario. He received his BFA from the Emily Carr Institute, Vancouver in 2004 and his MFA from NSCAD University, Halifax in 2008. He has exhibited across Canada, in the U.S., Australia and Sweden. In 2009 he received Honourable Mention for the Halifax Mayor’s Award for Contemporary Visual Art and was twice named a semi-finalist in the RBC Canadian Painting Competition. In 2013, Hutchinson’s work will appear in The Painting Project, a survey of contemporary Canadian painting curated by Louise Dry and Julie Blisle and organized by L’Universit du Qubec Montral as well as the group show Imaging Disaster, at Museum London. Hutchinson is represented by Angell Gallery, Toronto.
The artist gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council.
Technical assistance provided by Gallery 44, Toronto.
Read CRAIG RODMORE‘S A Field Without Origin / Notes on Paintings for Electric Light, an essay about DANIEL HUTCHINSON‘S
Documentation
