Sean Walker Hutton
Playing Dead + Having Fun

AMPHI Gallery is pleased to present Playing Dead & Having Fun, an exhibition of new paintings by Sean Walker Hutton. This is the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery and will be on view from July 11 to August 22.

Bringing together several works ranging from the gentle, intimate scale of the hand-held to larger pieces that span several feet, Hutton’s compositions favor a quiet and sustained attention. Across the exhibition, imagined geological sites appear alongside isolated figures and objects. Suspended heads hover, transcendent, over distant atolls and silky beds of water. Craters, rocky outcroppings, and icy masses give way to earth-shaping tools and atmospheric fields of color.

Rather than depicting specific or observed places, Hutton conceives his landscapes from an internal logic informed by his interest in geomorphology and the processes that have given the earth its topological shape. Working in oil paint and marble dust, he establishes the surfaces of his works through accumulation, layers of paint glazed and scumbled, allowing forms to emerge gradually as though from behind the luster of a gossamer veil. While the imagery at the surface of his paintings appears softened, each work bears the trace of its own formation. Drips and segments of built-up paint envelop the edges of each panel, a record of the material’s incremental deposition, much in the way that each geological present is itself the result of immeasurable pressures and progressions.

Though scale shifts throughout the exhibition, both the smaller and the larger works speak to each other, presenting images that feel distant and subdued, as though partially withheld. The figures drifting through Hutton’s spaces act almost as extensions of the terrains in which they are placed, subject to their climates, vulnerable to terrestrial conditions larger than themselves. A trace of the divine meanders quietly through each work without materializing as a specific form, appearing less as an embodied presence than as an awareness of something just barely perceived. In addition to landscapes, figures, and objects, several non-representational works are interspersed throughout the show. These paintings don’t stray from the elements of the figurative works so much as push them further, with forms lingering at the precipice of recognition before dissolving back into the surface of abstraction.

The worlds inside Playing Dead & Having Fun resist finality: time and place stretch and loosen, suspended yet continuous in their inexorable impermanence.

Text by Malena Steelberg.