DANIEL HUTCHINSON
  • Exhibitions / Projects
    • Florilegium
    • Tin Vision
    • Bright Black
    • Delta Flowers
    • Staging Abstraction
    • Mirror, Mirror
    • When the Lighthouse is Dark between Flashes
    • Paintings For Electric Light
    • Almanac
    • No Object
    • Half-light over the Baltic Sea
    • Bon Echo
    • Zero Dimensions
  • About
  • Reviews
    • Visual Arts News, Ray Cronin
    • Artoronto, David Saric
    • Toronto Star, Murray Whyte
    • Border Crossings, Ben Portis
    • YYZ Artists Outlet, Patricia Ritacca
    • Artoronto, Shellie Zhang
    • Akimbo, March 13th 2012
    • Viewers Like You, February 25th 2012
    • The Huffington Post, February 23rd 2012
    • Toronto Life, February 23rd 2012
    • The Globe and Mail, December 30th 2011
    • Modern Toronto, August 16th 2011
    • The National Post, April 22nd 2011
    • Mass Art Guide, November 1st 2009
    • Montreal Mirror, October 15th 2009
    • Flight + Hotel, October 30th 2009
  • Essays
    • The Painter's Painter by Meraj Dhir
    • A Field Without Origin / Notes on Paintings for Electric Light by Craig Rodmore
    • Navigation. Blackness. by Sara Hartland-Rowe
    • Daniel Hutchinson. by Ben Klein
    • Zero Dimensions par: Lotfi Gouigah (français)
  • Contact
  • Writing
Picture

When the Lighthouse is Dark between Flashes
Angell Gallery, Toronto
August 22 to September 27, 2014

“Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is the instant between the ticks of the watch: it is a void interval slipping forever through time: the rupture between past and future: the gap at the poles of the revolving magnetic field, infinitesimally small but ultimately real. It is the interchronic pause when nothing is happening. It is the void between events.”
George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, 1962

In WHEN THE LIGHTHOUSE IS DARK BETWEEN FLASHES, Hutchinson references both the macrocosm and the microcosm. Titles point to broad analogies with astronomy, cosmology and particle physics, but also refer to the works’ immediate physical environment and the very materials of their essence.

The series Paintings for Sterling Board feature brushstrokes that respond to supports built from sterling board, a compressed-wood product that Hutchinson honours by replicating its textured, irregular surface in dark, glistening oil paint. In Painting for Sterling Board and Nonagon Shape (dark energy expansion) the radiating polygonal shape of the frame provides a visual analogy to the dark matter energy propelling the rapid expansion of the universe. 

Works in the series Paintings for Picture Frames respond to their surroundings, quite literally, as interlacing curved or geometric brush strokes complement and contrast with the frames that contain them. Titles such as Painting for a Picture Frame (as a molecular cloud), and the illusion of depth created by contrasting areas of flat black and shimmering highlights, point to the external world. Yet these paintings’ non-objective nature pulls us firmly back to the realm of the abstraction and the artwork as thing in itself.

In Paintings for Electric Light, a series begun in 2013, brushstrokes are applied in response to fluorescent light fixtures arranged in various configurations. As reflected light shifts across the painting’s surface in accordance with the viewer’s movements, the sense of dynamism is palpable. Likening this relationship to the workings of a lighthouse (inspired by an analogy found in George Kubler’s The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things), Hutchinson states:

“Impossible to view fully from any one vantage point, the movement of the body of the viewer reveals the carefully coordinated formal relationships of colour, texture and surface, acting out the metaphor of the lighthouse; navigation, discovery, adventure and so on. Like the stars in the night sky, which pierce the blackness of the void with points of pulsing, coloured light, the lighthouse guides wayward travellers home.”

A selection of works from the exhibition:
© 2006 - 2020 Daniel Hutchinson. All rights reserved.
  • Exhibitions / Projects
    • Florilegium
    • Tin Vision
    • Bright Black
    • Delta Flowers
    • Staging Abstraction
    • Mirror, Mirror
    • When the Lighthouse is Dark between Flashes
    • Paintings For Electric Light
    • Almanac
    • No Object
    • Half-light over the Baltic Sea
    • Bon Echo
    • Zero Dimensions
  • About
  • Reviews
    • Visual Arts News, Ray Cronin
    • Artoronto, David Saric
    • Toronto Star, Murray Whyte
    • Border Crossings, Ben Portis
    • YYZ Artists Outlet, Patricia Ritacca
    • Artoronto, Shellie Zhang
    • Akimbo, March 13th 2012
    • Viewers Like You, February 25th 2012
    • The Huffington Post, February 23rd 2012
    • Toronto Life, February 23rd 2012
    • The Globe and Mail, December 30th 2011
    • Modern Toronto, August 16th 2011
    • The National Post, April 22nd 2011
    • Mass Art Guide, November 1st 2009
    • Montreal Mirror, October 15th 2009
    • Flight + Hotel, October 30th 2009
  • Essays
    • The Painter's Painter by Meraj Dhir
    • A Field Without Origin / Notes on Paintings for Electric Light by Craig Rodmore
    • Navigation. Blackness. by Sara Hartland-Rowe
    • Daniel Hutchinson. by Ben Klein
    • Zero Dimensions par: Lotfi Gouigah (français)
  • Contact
  • Writing