Harold Ancart: an introduction to the info-free painting

 

The name of the Belgian artist Harold Ancart is at the moment on the wishing list of many collectors, and it will probably stay there also after the show which opened last Thursday at Casey Kaplan, where a new group of canvases with his typical lively colored boomerang flying on a geometric background has been presented.

 

In terms of aesthetics it is easy – perhaps too easy – to consider these works objectively beautiful and if you have any doubt about it please go back to Ramachandran’s primitive figurals. However, in this case the problem lies in the information the paintings convey, which unfortunately seem far from being new or interesting. In an article published a few days ago by Out of order magazine Ancart gives a couples of weak answers regarding the form and the meaning of his artworks. In the first one he says that there are many elements in his recent drawings that are swinging between figuration and abstraction, but he doesn’t feel that there is such a huge gap in between those two forms of representation. In the second answer he basically complains with whoever sees nostalgia in his canvases: “The thing is that I am not nostalgic for a cent” he says, “my work is turned towards the future”. That’s all, and no help comes from the elusive introductory texts of this current show or the previous ones at Clearing or Xavier Hufkens.

 

As you may see by scrolling our timeline, there are many artists nowadays who are working on the pure aestethics of the picture. Of course we regard it as a respectable approach (when artists are aware of it), although opposite to the Wade Guyton’s one, who has always supported his paintings with a proper information system, or to that of younger artists such as David Ostrowsky and Sam Falls. Perhaps the time has come to realize the existence of the information-free painting, whose roots could be traced back to the impressionism. But then we should also accept that, in the end, the only possible iconology of these artworks will be the one based on the information provided by the auction houses.

 

Info-free art, definition: a kind of art for which no specific theory is given, and no fundamental info is produced, linked, or approved by the artist himself.

July 18, 2015