Untitled

Harold Ancart’s Untitled, 2017, is richly pigmented in generous, textural oil stick, the young artist’s signature medium. For Untitled, Ancart has drawn an exuberant bouquet of flowers grow in front of an orange and dove grey ground. Flecks and feathers of crimson and black flicker and float confetti-like. Each rounded bud is electric and the green, red pink and yellow swirl together to form a vibrating blossom of glowing colour. They bloom sublimely and wonderfully, set against a starburst of black. The bouquet defies the painting’s horizontal division, a formal device favoured by the young artist, explaining that ‘without a horizon line, one gets lost and eventually dies’ (H. Ancart quoted in N. Rea, ‘How the Self-Deprecating Belgian Painter Harold Ancart Charmed the Art World’, Artnet, September 10, 2018, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/harold-ancart-david-zwirner-1344881). Ancart has regularly been compared to the Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still, who applied his vivid paint with a palette knife to produce jagged, lightning bolt shapes. In many ways, Ancart’s colour blocking resembles that of Still, and both artists present form as contingent upon the chromatic. But unlike his predecessor, however, Ancart’s imagery relies upon a fusion of abstract and figurative to create a new and thrilling visual vocabulary. His work feels at once familiar and wholly revelatory, an exhilarating glimpse into uncharted territory. In this land, half-tones and shadows do not exist, and form is constantly overwhelmed by luminescent colour. Untitled swells and transforms, a flourishing of lush tones and graphic line. Ancart’s deft use of oil stick elegantly balances this a torrent of expression, and in Untitled, flowers bloom into ecstatic, radiant colour.