Jim Hittinger: Book of Hours

Jim Hittinger’s work draws from the forced perspective and flattened spaces found in late medieval European painting and classic fantasy role-playing games. Both traditions use striking images of heroes, monsters and miracles to illustrate themes of morality and spirituality. Hittinger channels those aesthetics to depict more banal subjects, constructing disorienting environments where light, screens and windows operate as portals between the mundane and the fantastical.

Books of hours were used in the Middle Ages as a way of tracking time by illuminating prayers and psalms specific to certain seasons, weeks and hours of the day. Hittinger’s paintings collectively serve as a book of hours for a 21st century skeptic reflecting on his religious upbringing. Here, the passage of time is compressed between distant memories of a 1990s Catholic elementary school and the rituals of present-day domestic life. Tiles, bricks, wood floors and cinder block walls are recurring motifs throughout the new work, obscured into abstract patterns that define the beguiling planes and spaces of the painted images.