Will Hutnick’s exhibition SATELLITE at Geary Contemporary in Millerton transformed shapes drawn from the natural world into layered paintings of colour, pattern and spatial disruption.
Based in Sharon, Connecticut, Hutnick built the works from forms encountered in his immediate surroundings, including plants and leaves.
Nature translated into pattern
The paintings move between recognisable organic shapes and structures that become increasingly ambiguous as they are repeated, layered and recoloured.
In some works, the source object remains visible. In others, it dissolves into a larger field of lines, silhouettes and artificial colour.
Hutnick described his aim as creating moments in which assumptions about space begin to unravel.
Hideaway and the instability of the surface
Hideaway, a 2023 acrylic and wax-pastel painting, combined a lined brown ground with greens, blues and repeated leaf forms.
Some leaves appeared as faint traces while others emerged as brighter, less natural versions of themselves.
The effect suggested both vegetation and the visual distortion of looking through moving water.
SATELLITE used that uncertainty throughout the exhibition, placing natural and artificial patterns in the same visual field and asking viewers to reconsider where one ends and the other begins.