BY ZACHARY GINSBURG
When an artist leaves parts of a painting incomplete — finishing a figure in quick, sketchy outlines or putting down a few shapes to indicate an object for the sake of composition — it is often because the artist has limited time with a subject and they want to capture its immediate vitality before it evaporates. In Hannah van Bart’s paintings at Marianne Boesky Gallery, their unfinished quality suggests the opposite problem. Rather than racing to record what is in front of her, she seems to excavate details of the subject from her memory, one brushstroke at a time. If a painting looks unfinished, as almost all these seem at first to be, it is because that’s all she could remember.
The resulting images are pale and haunted. They recall Picasso’s early works of acrobats and harlequins. Rather than thick makeup whitening their faces, however, van Bart’s subjects are white because you can see the canvas through their translucent (or half-rendered) skin. In one untitled painting of a man drinking from a mug, van Bart makes his hands fully present but stops before getting to his forehead and hair. It’s unclear if he’s a veritable ghost, a hallucination, or a computer image in the process of loading.
Van Bart’s art mimics the sensation of memory, with all its uncertainty and follies. Just as you might only remember the glint of gold on a spoon or the red of a woman’s lips, van Bart does this literally in her pictures. Because the details are so few, the ones she does conjure carry a Proustian significance. As viewers, we are brought to fixate on these objects in isolation, and contemplate the emotional baggage they may carry. For example—also like Proust—van Bart takes a liking to tea time, with tea cups, pots, and spoons well represented among the subjects of her still lifes. They clearly sit on solid surfaces with shadows cast beneath them. This implies that they come from a certain context — they weren’t plucked from thin air. At the same time, our view is so close up that we can’t see the edge of the table, creating the illusion that these objects could be suspended in space. The rest is left as an exercise to the viewer. What do these tea cups mean to van Bart? Are they from her childhood? Did they belong to a relative?
Although the color palette of these paintings is quite gloomy (black, white, gray, and a sickly green), the overall emotional tenor feels more mixed. One landscape appears to be a thinly veiled reference to Van Gogh’s painting Wheatfield with Crows, which is often mislabelled as his last work before committing suicide. Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo that his wheatfield and crows “express sadness, and extreme loneliness,” but at the same time, “what I consider healthy and fortifying about the countryside.” Van Bart’s version is no less harrowing — a white field with dashes of black representing clods of dirt and grass, while raven-like birds circle above. But, unlike Van Gogh, there is no redemption for van Bart’s sulking picture hidden in an equally powerful love for life. This painting’s depression finds its counterpoint in mystery, rather than revelry.
In another nod to Van Gogh, the show includes a still life of leather boots, which act as a physical instantiations of memory — holding years of stomping through fields in creases and dirt. Van Bart could have painted someone wearing them, doing farm work, or hiking. Instead, she only depicts what those activities left behind.
Thank you for reading, and, as always, thank you to my editor, Emma Schneider.
