Untitled (Seascape)

Sweeping bands of tactile oil stick fill Harold Ancart’s nocturnal Untitled (Seascape). Created in 2014, this is a preternatural world where the sea glows green and shimmering clouds float blissfully through the blackened sky. Lacking in depth or terrestrial specifics, the painting nevertheless evokes a receding skyline, were Ancart’s overlapping strokes are voracious and vigorous, an excessive archaeology of black strata. The present work is part of a larger cycle, for which Ancart rotated his characteristically vertical canvases in favour of a maritime orientation. Horizons recur throughout Ancart’s practice, as both grounding forces and otherworldly demarcations; his current sculptural installation Subliminal Standard, 2019, created for New York’s Public Art Fund, draws attention to these omnipresent boundaries as seen on the city’s ubiquitous handball courts. The dividing present in Untitled (Seascape) seems similarly tellurian, but the painting conveys an otherworldly movement. It is a journey through a shapeshifting dreamworld of transmuting form; the skyline may be present, but it does little to secure reality. Indeed, although Ancart’s seascapes appear to be static images, ‘freeze-frames glimpsed from the window of a coastal train, perhaps – they assert themselves as details of a much larger picture, suggesting an irrepressible sense of movement like the ebb and flow of tides’ (K. Harriman, ‘Back and Forth with Artist Harold Ancart’, Cultured, 29 April 2019, https://www.culturedmag.com/harold-ancart/). In Untitled (Seascape) lies a portal to another world, boundless, open, elusive, infinite.