änalog or analogue
n. 1. Something bearing an analogy, or partial similarity, to something else
Like his much admired predecessors and contemporaries including Gerhard Richter, Chuck Close and William Delafield Cook, John Hart is fundamentally concerned with the complex, often ambivalent intersection between classical painting, photography and digital imaging. Employing photo-mechanical material as the impetus for their painting, such artists not only set one representational process against another, creating a tension in their work between the indexicality of photography and the conceptual or imaginative possibilities of painting. More importantly perhaps, by subjecting photography to this imitative approach, they subvert a prevailing assumption that photography heralded the demise of representational painting.
In the pursuit of greater resemblance, Hart here contributes a further, intriguing dimension to this debate - translating the material nature and realism of digitally-manipulated photography into paintings which, paradoxically, are more persuasive in their illusion of the real. Based upon the construction of small paper models which have been photographed and digitally altered to isolate the objects within a field of darkness, thus his paintings are poignant testimony to the contention that photography has ‘come full circle’. Once the technology that threatened painting’s role as the prime source of analogous images, now photography itself is subject to digital imaging thereby undermining its value as an accurate or truthful record of the real.
With their theatrical lighting, magnified scale and eerie stillness, Hart’s images betray an overwhelming, almost unnerving sense of drama and strangeness: the longer one focuses upon this fragment of reality extracted from its surroundings, the more intense or mysterious the experience becomes. Featuring common objects (such as bottles) wrapped in paper to obfuscate any sense of the ‘familiar’ or alternatively, objects which have been constructed to be deliberately ‘unfamiliar’, indeed such works notably transcend the obvious or particular - entering, rather, a metaphysical realm. In this respect, the Australian artist bears affinities with not only German realism (particularly the Neue Sachlichkeit movement) and elements of academic surrealism, but also, with masters of seventeenth-century Dutch painting such as Willem Kalf, whose aesthetic established that the subject is not always the most important element of painting.
Encapsulating the realism of our time, Hart distills and meticulously renders his objects to such a degree that they cannot but be perceived as images in their own right, in their complete neutrality. Devoid of narrative overtones or overtly symbolic content, his paintings thus remain deliberately elusive, ambiguous - beguiling both the eye and mind with their enigmatic presence. As acclaimed philosopher of German Romanticism, Friedrich von Hardenberg (better known by his pseudonym ‘Novalis’) mused, ‘…By giving what is commonplace an exalted meaning, what is ordinary a mysterious aspect, what is familiar the impressiveness of the unfamiliar, and the finite the appearance of infinity.’
Veronica Angelatos
Arts Writer, Melbourne