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Descriptif du lot
Untitled (2014) is a magnificent monumental work by the Belgian artist Harold Ancart. Across four large-scale panels, floral forms, shard-like leaves and white fragments float before a black backdrop. The botanical melee is depicted in intense bursts of colour, with reds, greens, pinks and blues exploding like fireworks against the darkness. Flecks and scrawls of raw pigment float with the lightness of confetti. The work is a spectacular example of Ancart’s multipart tableaux, which fuse abstraction, figuration and graphic and painterly mark-making.
Ancart works primarily in oilstick, a medium which dries quickly and produces vivid tones, but makes it harder to achieve precise forms. The artist welcomes this element of chaos. ‘A lot of people focus on what they can control and forget about what they cannot control,’ he explains, ‘but I say, let’s do the opposite’ (H. Ancart, quoted in K. Herriman, ‘Back and Forth with Artist Harold Ancart’, Cultured, 29 April 2019). Here, he uses both oilstick and graphite to build a febrile surface, where colour appears to leap from the picture plane. Ancart contrasts this chromatic depth with a striking flatness of perspective. As a child in Brussels, he copied bandes dessinées and manga, and his work takes up the graphic deftness of Belgian comic-strip artists like Hergé and Peyo.
Ancart has lived in New York since 2007, and he cites the American Abstract Expressionists Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman among his favourite artists. Even as he includes figurative elements, Ancart’s fiery squalls of colour evoke the practice of these modern masters. The picture’s ragged-edged forms in particular echo those of Still, which themselves were informed by the vast landscapes of the United States. Ancart brings them into dialogue with motifs seemingly lifted from a floral still life, creating a playful narrative edge to the work: a bouquet is detonated into abstraction, fluttering to earth in a glorious inferno.
Ancart works primarily in oilstick, a medium which dries quickly and produces vivid tones, but makes it harder to achieve precise forms. The artist welcomes this element of chaos. ‘A lot of people focus on what they can control and forget about what they cannot control,’ he explains, ‘but I say, let’s do the opposite’ (H. Ancart, quoted in K. Herriman, ‘Back and Forth with Artist Harold Ancart’, Cultured, 29 April 2019). Here, he uses both oilstick and graphite to build a febrile surface, where colour appears to leap from the picture plane. Ancart contrasts this chromatic depth with a striking flatness of perspective. As a child in Brussels, he copied bandes dessinées and manga, and his work takes up the graphic deftness of Belgian comic-strip artists like Hergé and Peyo.
Ancart has lived in New York since 2007, and he cites the American Abstract Expressionists Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman among his favourite artists. Even as he includes figurative elements, Ancart’s fiery squalls of colour evoke the practice of these modern masters. The picture’s ragged-edged forms in particular echo those of Still, which themselves were informed by the vast landscapes of the United States. Ancart brings them into dialogue with motifs seemingly lifted from a floral still life, creating a playful narrative edge to the work: a bouquet is detonated into abstraction, fluttering to earth in a glorious inferno.