Review published in Border Crossings Magazine,

Issue #109, February 2009, pp 100–102

by Petra Halkes

Stephen Hutchings / Galerie St-Laurent + Hill December 5 - 17 2008

 There is more to Stephen Hutchings’ new paintings than meets their mechanical reproduction. What is lost in the images that illustrate this review, and even in those that pop up on the web, is not just the scale, but the worked-over surfaces of these seemingly consolidated pictures. The paintings’ intense luminosity picks out single tree leaves and blades of grass even in these illustrations, but much of the elaborate creative process--the scratching, rubbing, and overlaying of paint–is apparent only in the originals. Some of Hutchings’ ironic undercutting of the Romantic idea of nature is thus lost in reproduction.

 In front of the originals that measure up to six by six feet, the seamlessness of the skillfully rendered scenes falls apart. The colouring, the overly dramatic lighting and the slightly skewed compositions turn these landscapes hyper real. Traces of the painting process transform the idea of timelessness into an unreachable ideal, something to strive ‘towards,’ but never to reach (Landscape with Tree and Path (towards the divine), 2008). The images have their origins in photographs, taken by Hutchings and digitally manipulated. From this high-tech process he proceeds to a low tech one and traces the image on canvas with the aid of an opaque projector.   Hutchings then begins the painting process, first with charcoal, which he rubs into the canvas to create large solid forms. He modifies this form with erasers, bringing light into the darkness, specks at the time. The drawing is then overlaid with layers of thin, slightly coloured oil glazes. Hutchings’ unique process creates an uncertain surface, which smoothness is undercut by erased marks, streaks, scratches and smudges.  The use of sepia tones and a dark halo around some images (Shoreline Bush with Marker and Far Shore, 2008) further reminds us that we are not looking at memories of nature, but at memories of an idea of nature.

 Hutchings’ paintings come alive with an unresolved tension between the desire for divine infinity and finite human existence. In the 1990s, irony weighted this tension in favour of the existential finite. Then, his series of Plants, Bushes and Hedges--flat, dark silhouettes on screen-like backgrounds--emphatically denied the possibility of an immanent spirituality in nature. At the same time, they formed emblems of desire for such fusion. In his recent paintings, the desire for the infinite hangs heavier in the balance than the reality of finite life. Especially in reproduction, the paintings appear to come closer to a straight appropriation of  late nineteenth century nature imagery, which, to Romantics, could represented the absolute Divine. Roads and horizons open up space. Where a bush from 1995 stood out against an empty background, a majestic tree of 2008 is placed near a river that shows both shorelines (Single Tree on the Shoreline, 2008). Art-historical  references to late Romanticism have become more specific: highlighted details in the landscape remind us of Luminist paintings, while the muted colours and play of shadows and light brings back European Pictorialist photography.

 Computer technology differentiates Hutchings’ present work from his earlier series and helps him refine the effects that produce Romantic signs for nature: sharp contrasts, highlights, haziness, and dark, brooding colours (Distant Storm, 2008). He reveals thereby the artificiality and culture-based grounds of the Romantic idea of nature that was thought to represent the Absolute, the Divine, the Truth. But although the ephemeral technical methods combined with centuries-old oil glazing techniques provide a glimmer of infinity, underneath it all there remains the blackness of burnt wood, the charcoal drawing. Hutchings remains the allegorist who keeps the ruin and the promise close together.

 The allegorical irony that remains evident in Hutchings’ paintings, does not obscure the homage to Romantic painters and Pictorialist photography that these works also provide. Such an homage may be seen to conflict with our current concern for the state of real nature, as well as with our current acute awareness of the hybridity of culture and nature. The Romantic idea of nature, representing the Absolute, the Divine, the Truth, is a totalizing ideal that leaves the specificity and fragility of actual nature far behind, and shuts out the reality of finite human existence. While Hutchings subtly deconstructs this idea of nature, his paintings remain ablaze with the desire for an enchantment of nature to reach the divine.

 Hutchings’ empty landscapes retain a power to unleash existential emotions, as do the aestheticized landscapes of other contemporary painters (April Gornik, James Lahey and Takao Tanabe come to mind). The persistence of popular paintings of unspoiled landscapes in mainstream culture, forms another indication that a quest continues to find enchantment, a spell that would erase our mortality in the nature that sustains us.

 Bronislaw Szerszynski, in Nature, Technology and the Sacred (2005) has argued that the enchantment of the world does not end in secular modernity, but continues to be transformed in a myriad of cultural practices. Szerszynski works with an understanding of the sacred as a dynamic ordering of nature that, through art and techno-science, allows for an imagined unity of self and other, while remaining essentially mysterious.

 Hutchings’ paintings do not show a romantic nature infused with spirit, but rather a historical idea of nature that still has the power to invoke a sense, a glimmer, of infinite spirit. For Hutchings, technology provides ever more sophisticated tools to expand a language of effects that creates this feeling of enchantment. A penetrating light in even the darkest of pictures alludes to that unimaginable place without time, against which the fragility of the Earth and the limitations of human endeavours stand out in sharp relief.

Petra Halkes works as an artist, writer and curator in Ottawa. Her book Aspiring to the Landscape, On Painting and the Subject of Nature (2006) contains a chapter on Stephen Hutchings’ series Plants, Bushes and Hedges.