Given Alex Hutton’s fascination with roller coasters and giant waterslides, he’s never actually been on one. “The height and the sinking feeling of free fall bother me too much to enjoy them,” he told The Giant. In a way, this adds an extra dimension to the mysterious, uninhabited atmosphere of his meticulous paintings, which focus on roller coasters, waterslides and intricate frames.
Instead of cars rolling along tracks, Hutton focused solely on volumes, lines and three-dimensional grids, often setting undulating forms against blank or bush backgrounds so that even their scale was disorienting. While we often associate these rides with youthful exuberance and nostalgia, when reduced to pure engineering, these structures are surprisingly still and austere.
“A lot of theme park rides, like roller coasters and waterslides, that I find fascinating are ridiculous,” Hutton told Colossal, continuing:
They expressed a mixture of excitement and fear. They display elegant and impressive movement through space with stunning proportions, curves, rhythm and color. So much material, time, engineering and maintenance goes into a short ride designed to take people through space and create a sense of excitement and danger in a controlled environment.
Hutton sees these paintings as a natural offshoot of the computer games he played in the early 2000s, such as SimCity and RollerCoaster Tycoon, whose world-building aesthetics (particularly the bird’s-eye view) fired his imagination. His roller coasters and water slides are an extension of the practice, incorporatings Topics such as boardwalks, bridges, landscapes, structural frameworks, and even prehistoric anatomy.
Many roller coasters and slides are based on real buildings. For example, the form of “Foment” is based on a water slide called the Super Whooper in Kobe, Japan. It was demolished after the 1995 earthquake. “Roil” comes from an existing water park in Qatar called Meryal, which has the world’s largest waterslide structure. “It’s hard to believe that some of these buildings were ever built,” Hutton said. “I try to capture the absurdity and audacity of their existence.”
For the artist, it is not important that the painting represents a recognizable place, but rather that it depicts formal qualities. Movement and proportion are just a few of the factors he considers when planning his composition. “I look for a rhythm, a structure, a combination of colors that is exciting enough to spend time with,” Hutton said. “I wanted to find something unlikely, something reconsidered from a new angle or perspective, but these moments can be hard to track.”
The two untitled works in the photo will be on display at Main Projects in Richmond, Virginia, through April 30. He is currently preparing for a solo exhibition to be held at SHRINE in New York next year. Find more information on Instagram.
