Considering Alex Hutton’s fascination with rollercoasters and monumental waterslides, he doesn’t actually ever climb aboard. “Heights and the sinking feeling during free-fall bother me too much to enjoy them,” he tells Colossal. In a way, that adds even further dimension to the enigmatic, unpeopled atmosphere of his meticulous oil paintings, which focus on rollercoasters, waterslides, and intricately contrived frameworks.
Devoid of the cars that roll along the tracks, Hutton focuses exclusively on volume, line, and three-dimensional grids, also typically setting the undulating forms against blank or brushy backgrounds so that even their scale is disorienting. While we typically associate the rides with youthful energy and nostalgia, the structures are strangely still and stark when pared down to their pure engineering.
“There is an absurdity to many theme park rides like rollercoasters and waterslides that I find compelling,” Hutton tells Colossal, continuing:
They present a mixture of excitement and fear. They show graceful yet imposing movement through space with curves, rhythm, and color at a striking scale. So much material, time, engineering, and maintenance goes into a short ride designed to fling people through space and create a sense of thrill and danger in a controlled environment.
Hutton views these paintings as a natural offshoot of PC games he used to play in the early 2000s, such as Sim City and Rollercoaster Tycoon, where the aesthetics of world-building—especially from a bird’s-eye view—captivated his imagination. His rollercoasters and waterslides are extensions of a practice that incorporates subjects like boardwalks, bridges, landscapes, structural framing, and even prehistoric anatomy.
Many of the coasters and slides are based on real constructions. The form for “Foment,” for example, is based on a waterslide in Kobe, Japan, called the Super Whooper. It was demolished in 1995 following a huge earthquake. “Roil” comes from an existing waterpark in Qatar called Meryal, which is home to the world’s largest waterslide structure. “It is hard to believe that some of these structures were ever built,” Hutton says. “I try to capture that absurdity and audacity of their existence.”
It’s less important to the artist that the paintings represent recognizable places than to depict formal qualities. Movement and proportion are just a couple of things he considers when planning a composition. “I look for a rhythm, a structure, a combination of colors that is exciting enough to spend time with,” Hutton says. “I want to find something unlikely, something reconsidered in a new light or from a new angle, but those moments can be difficult to track down.”
The two untitled works pictured here are bound for an exhibition at Main Projects in Richmond, Virginia, which opens on April 30. And he’s currently working toward a solo exhibition at SHRINE in New York, slated for next year. Find more on Instagram.
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