Daniel Hutchinson

Daniel Hutchinson paints as if the sense of sight could be banished from the artist’s faculties. This is not to say that his works are not highly, even intriguingly, visual. However, Hutchinson turns to image schemes, analogues and aptitudes that surpass observation or imaginational departures therefrom. The title of the exhibition, “Almanac,” alluded to weather events yet to occur when they were portrayed by Hutchinson, events that might never occur as forecast, that even, should they occur, would do so according to natural laws that assume countless determined variations but ultimately irreducible patterns.

Hutchinson depicts atmospheres as being contiguous with their contents and residue—for instance, water’s potentially simultaneous occurrence as vapour, rain and ice. His paintings are not merely dark or black, they are truly opaque. However, opacity, while shutting out the light, has its own capacity for traversable, navigable and mappable space; how does a fog or a storm cell occupy and transform space? Consider it as a churning, engulfing mass of substance, rather than a passing phenomenon. Consider, similarly, air molecules, energy particles, photons. Hutchinson’s paintings assume such landmarks of nano-tangible navigation. They are fanciful projections of the mind, yet in order to be envisioned they require not just the relegation of sight, but its exclusion.

As the title implies, “Almanac,” which is multi-part, is a beautifully measured and cadenced exhibition, strung from the entry and intermittently through the gallery space. Painted on 31 eight-by-ten-inch panels variously in portrait or landscape orientation, one for each day of March 2013, it was inspired by the weather forecasts of the 196th edition of the Farmers’ Almanac. (Both predictions and paintings obviously realized well in advance: the exhibition opened on March 2.) The published almanac does not necessarily isolate and individuate day-by-day events. Rather, it clusters trends over a period. Hutchinson accordingly grouped his paintings, prognosticating from the vantage of Toronto, where he lives, works and has a vested interest in the weather. For example, a group of three, titled respectively Freezing Fog, Mixing and Black Ice, were collectively subtitled (2013/03/03–05: Rain and snow then sunny, cold) after the entry that they purport to portray.

Hutchinson’s oil paintings are near-monochrome blacks, each one specially prepared, sometimes mixed and modulated with a generous quotient of a deep chromatic hue, perhaps violet or blue. His application of paint is intimidatingly decisive, planned and controlled. His brush strokes are directionally sequenced, evenly spreading the viscous mixture, stiff enough to retain the striations of the bristles. He modifies and harnesses his brushes to achieve specific textures. The resulting images are patterns, often quite rational, but usually suggesting change and interference. And while resolutely handmade, these images have affinities to technologic translations of the supra-visible, such as genome mapping, crystallography, integrated circuit architecture, deep-space telescoping. Infrared, ultraviolet; is it even possible to expel the optical matrix from visual art?

In fact, Hutchinson’s allusion is something of an illusion, a ruse. Despite the implied specificity of their titles, not only in place but time, the small “Almanac” panels were in fact replicated details taken from the artist’s larger and earlier works, presumably where the unintended effects could have resulted. For some time, Hutchinson’s broader subject has been atmospherics, including sunspots, icebergs, waves, clouds and aurora borealis, to which the “Almanac” series offered a culmination. The phased calendar string of panels was punctuated by much larger tondo panels and rectangular canvases that are far less incidental, accidental and impressionistic. Instead, they appear declarative and, indeed, visionary. Xerographic Hexakaidecagon (150 cm in diameter) presumably conforms to its mechanically geometric (16-sided) title. Its surface was a regularly applied grid—horizontal rows of mosaic-like brush strokes. It was paired, with generous spacing, by the like-sized, circular Sunspots, a more fractal pattern of dark, dull blues, as if the results of corneal injury from staring into the sun. These paintings, like so many of Hutchinson’s works from the past five years, induce a curious mirror effect, as the striated brush strokes of lushly oiled pigments reflectively glint the local illumination, shimmering and reconfiguring according to the angle of observation and movement of the viewer. It is only possible to locate and see oneself in opacity. Conventional mirrors are, after all, hyper-opaque.

This, clearly, has stimulated Hutchinson too. The project room at Angell Gallery was devoted to three works hung in an unlit space, the paintings activated by a dedicated, integral fluorescent fixture. Aurora Seen in Greenland, c. 1874 alluded to the mystic encounters with Arctic light as recorded by early European explorers of the Far North. The six-foot panel had a radiant, moiré blackness, its surface erupting with frigid spikes. In his second Toronto exhibition of the spring, “Paintings for Electric Light,” at YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Hutchinson pushed this line of exploration further and exclusively. Works with clinically descriptive titles, such as Painting for Coloured Light (Cyan and Magenta) were reductively gridded with overall patterns of black paint strokes. Above or below or both, mounted on the wall or the floor, Hutchinson placed trim, custom-made fluorescent light fixtures. He has banded these bulbs with various gel filters, and with such regularity that what is obviously called to mind are the light works of Dan Flavin. These works were fully and intentionally optical, inducing wave patterns that are oblivious to the joy of the aesthetic eye, like obsidian. ❚

“Daniel Hutchinson: Almanac” was exhibited at Angell Gallery, Toronto, from March 2 to April 13, 2013. “Paintings for Electric Light” was exhibited at YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Toronto, from May 11 to August 10, 2013.

Ben Portis is the curator of the MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie, Ontario.