ART CITIES:Paris-Harold Ancart
Brussels-born artist Harold Ancart hopes to reveal the “tensions created between the various zones of emptiness” in his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installations. The artist uses crude materials including ink, charcoal powder, and soot for installations that emerge from actively adding these elements to the exhibition space. His sculptures, often rendered from concrete, poxy resin, or steel, summon primitive tools and ancient relics.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive
Harold Ancart’s juxtaposition between organic and contrived visuals reflects how space might be manipulated to reflect the imagination, and the ways in which an exhibition is a platform to toy with these expectations. Harold Ancart’s solo exhibition “Deep End” feature a new group of sculptures, part of a series of works that the artist began in the summer of 2017. These three-dimensional relief forms are cast in concrete, and painted with rich layers of color that recall art-historical, architectural, and everyday influences. The pools’ “compositions are fairly simple,” states Ancart. “The ‘basin’ can have any size and take any shape; so can the ‘staircases,’ and the color, well, the color can be anything too.” Bearing the traces of their making, the pools share the surface materiality and color of the paintings for which Ancart has become best known. They function, in a sense, as relief paintings that are situated within the three-dimensional space of the viewer, while their painted surfaces offer a range of visual and formal possibilities. In shrinking the size of a pool, Ancart amplifies its imaginative qualities, making an otherwise familiar object uncanny. While the artist has always seen painting as a means to travel, these works are also experienced as sculpture in the round, at once real and appearing perhaps as in a dream or a projection. They may not fulfill the standard promise of a pool, but “one could still invite their friends to have a drink or a cigarette around it,” as Ancart suggests.
Photo: Harold Ancart, Untitled, 2021, Oil stick on concrete, 2 x 35 x 23 inches (5.1 x 88.9 x 58.4 cm), © Harold Ancart, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery
Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 108, rue Vieille du Temple, Paris, France, Duration: 18/10-20/11/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com
