It is difficult to say where the boundaries of a work of art lie. For one artist, that is the moment when the last brushstroke is made and for another, the moment of presentation is just as much an integral part of the artwork. For David Christiaan Hutte (1987, Huizen) every detail counts in the search for the moment when works of art transcend reality. We spoke to him at his studio at the canals of Groningen. "As an artist you always hope that your work will somehow become a magical object."
“I didn't really grow up in a cultural environment and originally I wasn't very interested in art. After graduating from high school, I first took a year of sports training at Alfa College because at the time I didn't know what I wanted to do. In the years that followed I had a whole series of side jobs, from domestic help in home care to roofer. Although I have no background in culture, I did paint a lot in my youth and copied illustrations from art books. This slowly faded into the background over the years, until at one point I started to wonder why this had disappeared from my life and I promptly took up painting again at the age of twenty-four. Ever since I have devoted my life entirely to art. I have no experience in the field of art or culture and I have not studied at the art academy, but I am very enterprising by nature and that helps a lot if you want to build a life in art. For example, from 2015 to 2017 I had my own gallery on the canals of Groningen, where I made and presented my artworks. This turned out to be a bad choice because it became a hangout for many people and my production started to suffer, so I stopped after two years. The practical experience was very good for me, as well as all the feedback on my art that I received from the visitors.
“I work quite intuitively without a very fixed concept, but when I look back at my own work I notice that I am mainly concerned with interpreting reality. I investigate what makes art beautiful or magical and what a concept such as truth means in reality. On the one hand, as an artist you try to zoom out on such concepts and try to fathom what something like this means in the big picture, while on the other hand, paradoxically enough, you can only decipher the real meaning by zooming in on the details. I often find that it is the details that tell me the most about the underlying mechanisms and meanings. I don't really have sources of inspiration when it comes to other artists, but it's things like puns and little sentences that I read that inspire me the most. I find it interesting to try to imagine how you can capture a well-found combination of words in one image.
“While I am making my works, I often already think about the way I want to present it. Sometimes the form of presentation is determined by the way in which a work is structured. For example, at the moment I am working on a glass work that will only come into its own when it is placed in front of a dark background and has just the right lighting. Such things are important because they enhance the experience of a work and I'm interested in the wow effect. As an artist, you always hope that your work somehow becomes a magical object, that your work carries a certain power that can inspire people. That is also why organizing an exhibition is so important to me. With a well-designed exhibition you can just perfect the entire aesthetic experience, so that works of art suddenly get something sublime over them and thus transcend the everyday. For me, that part of the art practice is just as important as the work of art itself.”