Daniel Hutchinson @ Galerie Push
Flight + Hotel, October 30th 2009

”Zero Dimensions” until Nov. 15, 2009

Daniel Hutchinson has taken the monochrome painting out of abstraction and made it into a scene on a theatrical stage no less.Slick and stylized Hutchinson’s meticulous and carefully applied striations of glossy black paint create a convincing depth. The theatre spaces that these paintings depict are immediately apparent despite their monochrome rendering as their construction is sketched out by the way that surface reflects light which can be best described as shiny black groves reminiscent of vinyl records (and this nostalgia, I suspect, is my deepest attraction).

The next layer to the piece is the depiction of the theatre itself – spaces where we are often left in the dark to watch. Where we usually know that light is colour, here we learn that form can exist in darkness. We are witness to an illusion.

The theatres depicted are not the representations of real theatres (although their titles indicate they could be (the tryptic is called Stratford), but have been created in a computer program. They are spaces of the imagination on which we can project our own imagination.

Mind you, the series are not all monochrome. Hutchinson, gives the stage some players in the form of bright pinks and orange sticks forming circles. But the monochromes are the most compelling.