through a glass darkly
Clean white sheets, crumpled and twisted, hang or float in an otherworldly darkness challenging us to discover what they really mean. The artist’s controlled flattened brush strokes have produced a surface that is meticulous, restrained, and inscrutable. Whatever structure might be supporting the flow of fabric has been removed from the vista - lost in the ether. Folds and creases in the fabric provide a myriad of shapes and shadows within which our thoughts might wander. The new work harks back to an earlier series that utilised crumpled, twisted, knotted sheets of paper as its basis. The imagery resonates with the power of Dutch still life painting; silent and meditative. We wonder: Is this the light of morning, or the light of dusk in which the objects bathe? John Hart’s work raises questions about objectivity and subjectivity and whether these can be separated in a work of art. We scan the image for clues, but there are no easy resolutions.
The visual world exists in a state of flux; our ways of seeing become altered over time and by the different circumstances we encounter. Our minds edit and interpret everything we see: Any quest for an objective reality seems doomed from the start. Photography, at times, has certainly made the claim of being an objective process, produced as it is by a combination of physics, chemistry and mechanics. However, such a claim requires us to accept that the artist’s gaze can be edited out, that things can exist as pure form, without our intervention. Hart knows, as does any painter, that as soon as the brush touches the canvas surface, a position has been taken. His stripped down imagery nonetheless reaches towards the notion of objectivity; the absence of narrative and the restricted visual content aids in this endeavour.
Hart’s dark backgrounds seem impenetrable - a device intended by the artist to remove context from the work. The dense blackness in the images negates our perception of deep space so that the material object appears to spring from the surface of the canvas, almost trompe-l’oeil. One feels as though the imagery is boxed and presented to us like specimens from a laboratory experiment. But can context ever be fully abandoned or removed? Even supposing a truly objective image could be produced, the viewer of the image will always bring their own subjective connections to the work. What the artist does, with nuance and metaphor, is to critique how we filter information and then interfere with that. A clean white sheet may reference innocence or, having been crumpled, innocence lost. The artist realises this and clouds the issue further: We are not necessarily looking at a white sheet at all; we are looking at an artwork: Is it a painting, a digital photograph, a painting of a photograph, or some hybrid art form, something in between? The work blurs the distinctions between photography and painting.
John Hart’s latest series of oils on canvas presents an artist with a coherent, confident voice. Having mastered his technique, he now plays with our perceptions of what a painting is, and what being an artist is all about. More than simply a record of how something looked, we are left with an artefact, a physical manifestation of an artist’s conceptual stance. The work depicts an everyday object, a linen sheet in various random configurations. Such things, putting aside their possible aesthetic appeal, are ultimately ephemeral, even mundane. But intensified under studio lighting, processed via digital photography, and then elevated to the plane of fine art by classical painting, we find ourselves in the presence of something that requires our attention and our comprehension. It is a mystery on the threshold of our understanding, but delightfully out of reach.
Shaw Hendry
2009