Words Are Elves

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David Hutchinson
Words Are Elves
2016

About the Item

Acrylic and Enamel on Paper, 64.5" x 46.25" from WORDS ARE ELVES Series Paintings on Paper The background in the large paintings on paper are transcriptions of Sartre’s ‘A Strange Hell of Beauty’. The chromatic blocks are phrases excerpted from the text that have particular poetic appeal: ‘Words are Elves’, ‘The Aesthete is an Oblate’, ‘The Sun Begets a Shadow’, etc. The scale and simple graphic quality of these works intentionally reflects the nature of propaganda posters or broadsheets, capitalizing on directness of presentation and consolidation of message. These pictures are intended to be individual summations of my approach to formalism and re positioning of original content. In reading the texts of Jean Genet, I am continuously amazed at how he utilized formally evocative language to entice his readers into a complex world of amoral imagery, using the persuasive power of language to seduce his audience into the world’s dark underbelly. Christian painters have been doing something similarly for multiple generations by visually translating challenging, inhuman stories into graphic representations with incredible magnetic pull. For nearly two decades, I have been trying to push this phenomenon by emphasizing modernism’s push-and-pull between presentation and content. A large part of the body of my work has been working with the texts and life of Jean Genet to examine how the nature of formalism can absorb and subsume questionable morality by willfully re-presenting the material in a different artistic vocabulary. The exhibition at the Lionheart Gallery is entitled, ‘Words are Elves’. Because my interests focus on the nature of conceptualizing images and the aesthetic experience, it seemed appropriate for me to turn my attention to a highly-regarded critique of Genet’s aesthetics. In his novel, Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, the French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, offers an existential analysis of Genet’s psychology and morality. Sartre’s chapter on Genet’s aesthetics, ‘A Strange Hell of Beauty’, is the material from which this exhibition is based. In a seemingly unremarkable passage in this chapter, Sartre makes a passing statement: ‘words are elves’. It is an alarming observation that is not really lingered on; but in a follow-up statement Sartre compares a stylis to a wand - both having a magical ability to influence and transform imagery. Upon reading this short, throw-away passage, I immediately felt a strong parallel between the intent of the phrase, ‘words are elves’, and the emphasis of my own work. The works in this exhibition continue my concept-based practice of creating imagery that transforms written language into a coded visual language through the use of color ‘translations’ and patterned ‘transcriptions’. In the chromatic portions of my work, each block of color is a visual stand-in for a letter of the English alphabet (a = aquamarine, b = blue, c = crimson, d = dove gray, e = emerald, and so on). It is a chromatic alphabet based on English color names. Also in use in the works is my practice of transcribing the original texts in layers of overwriting, creating unreadable fields and patterns of hand writing. In previous works I have tended to keep these two practices of ‘translation’ and ‘transcription’ separate. In the works in this exhibition I am combining these two aesthetic approaches for the first time.

Creator:
David Hutchinson
Creation Year:
2016
Dimensions:
Height: 64.5 in (163.83 cm)Width: 46.25 in (117.48 cm)
Medium:
Acrylic,Enamel
Movement & Style:
Abstract
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Pound Ridge, NY
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU4241313303

Words Are Elves

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