Thomas Hutton. Visible invisibilities

The old quad of ivy-cloaked garçonnières by the Tiber River are barely seeped by sunlight rays. Two sculptures, installed inside two unexpected and unedited rooms, set a dialogue with the exhibition spaces, featuring details proper of an ancient bachelor pad. The British artist Thomas Hutton was invited by Studioli's founders, Alessandro Cicoria and Valerie Giampietro, to work and reinterpret selected available rooms, among smoked mirror surfaces, chromatic wall-to-wall carpeting, wainscoting and decors by Magistretti, Castiglioni, Cini Boeri and others. The conceptual artist is very fond of Rome and often affirmed that he just couldn’t see his work coming out of New York post-industrial spaces.

. He always has been looking for a place where he could be surrendered by the materials and the spatial conditions that his practice comes from, or is made of. That is what brought him in Rome, and that's why the Italian capital seemed the right place to realize and enhance his work in the last three years. Hutton actually lives between Athens and Italy, moreover he received an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University (2012) and an MA in Architectural History from The University of Edinburgh (2006). He has had solo exhibitions at Joni Levy, Zurich (2014), Hunter/Whitfield, London (2015), Sushi Bar Gallery, NYC (2017), and Unit 9, London (2017). Last but not least, his work has been included in group exhibitions at Fondazione Memmo, Rome (2015) and MoCA, Los Angeles (2018).
But Studioli is the formal opposite dimension of a white-cubed stage.

Studioli encompasses two autonomous studios, both little flats boasting a very fascinating history; in some of these environments the two founders live and work, while in others they invite artists to work directly on the building. Moreover, Cicoria and Giampietro, both artists, do not consider the venue only as an exhibition hub but as a conversation starter for a wider discussion between the artists and the space. Actually, Hutton's sculptural interventions are displaced on the beds, forming the focal point of the carpeted, smoke-mirrored rooms and becoming pedestals for the sculptures. Almost suddenly it appears two oversized pillows, plastered in adamantine white lime plaster and infinitely polished to play with the natural light source through the frosted glass windows. The armors are completely hidden within, but perhaps underlined by the small hole for air, a subtle allusion to their hollowness that recalls the empty eyes of Greek bronze .On the origins, they were found rusting in the bottom of a travertine quarry in Tivoli where they’re used to pry the freshly cut of stone from the quarry wall. Then they were plastered with a lime plaster, which became the visible subject matter and ultimately the material of the sculptures.

Hutton is always hesitant to prescribe or determine a methodology meaning.  Whereas if a visitor, at Studioli, thinks he sees one thing, then he start watching another thing, then another and he is more likely to spend a bit of time with it, thinking about it. Abstraction can be a useful tool for achieving this. So in Rome Hutton is more interested in setting up and conceiving a physical, or better, a temporal experience. And usually that experience has something to do with the nature of how we perceive surfaces and forms in front of us, with regard to the consistency of physical phenomena.