'Formal Issues #2', 2006
cardboard, paint, tape, 120 x 100 x 90
'Player vs Player, or The Heino', 2004
'Pressure Ridge,' 1995
lightbox, 150 x 60
In 2003 New York-based artist Timothy Hutchings (born 1974) made a series of muted blue, grey and white landscape images with titles like 'Mountains' and 'Pressure Ridge'. Placed in lightboxes, these polar views were printed on Duratrans film, the very technology used to create backlit display messaging at trade show exhibits, as well as television studio and theatre backdrops. As such, the ostensibly self-contained, window-like images seem to be missing something: a protagonist, a narrative - action of some kind. They take on an anxious character, lying in wait for some unforeseen event to unfold in the foreground. A consideration of the artist's broader thematic preoccupations reveals the potential nature of that event to be something far from benign.
Hutchings' sculptural practice presents a novel intersection of pastiche Minimalist geometry with an interest in social and formal aspects of play and gaming, but warfare provides a sustained undercurrent to each of these concerns. In earlier works by the artist, the latter aspect is explicit: a number of large angular sculptures constructed, variously, of wood, cardboard and tape, are titled after armoured cars, tanks and military bunkers, and are clearly reminiscent of such hulking metallic forms. It is in a later series of predominantly cardboard sculptures, 'Formal Issues' (2006-7), that a somewhat purer Minimalist geometry is allied to an uneasy sense of violence, as if each multi-faceted object is the result of some jarring impaction (providing a neat link to his earlier photographs of 'Demolition Derby Cars'); that this accounts for their scattered placement in the gallery, toppling in various corners of the room.
In 2006 Hutchings created 'The World's Largest Wargaming Table' from MDF, wood and Styrofoam, postdating the Chapman Brothers' similarly appropriative 'Hell' (1999-2000), but - in its invocations of fun, simulation and the strategic deployment of death from safe distances - offering something arguably more sinister.
To see more of Timothy Hutchings work registered on Saatchi Online click here.
Bill Roberts
Bill Roberts is a writer based in London, and a PhD candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art.
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