For those artists whose concern is with painting itself, certain factors are all but impossible to avoid. One is the privileging of the process of making rather than an end result. Another is the presence—real or notional—of the grid as an index of the relationship between painting and the world, an aid to the task of reconciling support surfaces, frame, and the configuration of the paint matter. Alexis Harding’s work is not, in these terms, disingenuous.The grid is unabashedly present in this show, pulled and distorted, broken and attenuated, both grid and the process of its coherence being disrupted central to Harding’s practice.
Harding’s paintings begin with the laying of an oil ground on the horizontal fiberboard. A trough with regularly spaced holes punched in its base is then filled with gloss paint and twice passed over the still-wet oil. The second pass, at right angles to the first, describes a loose grid. Then the painting is allowed to dry, a months-long process of mingling, puckering, slipping, breaking, and smearing. Because of the large amount of paint used, a skin quickly forms under which the still-liquid remainder acts as a lubricant for movement on the surface, refusing to let it adopt a fixed position. The tilting, turning, and more aggressive treatments of the still-wet fiberboard cause the skin to break and be swept across the underlying layers, furthering the distance that each work travels from the initial application of paint to final display.
In most instances, the ultimate, thoroughly dried painting remains stable. Delicate in appearance, as if nothing more than a strong breath would cause the forms to metamorphose once more, there is nonetheless a certain stability evidenced. The parted “curtains” of Untitled (Split), 1997, droop off the bottom edge of the fiberboard, but should not move again. This achieved stability is largely what we see, yet we are not left with a feeling of reassurance or certainty when looking at these paintings. Cover, 1998, a tight black and purple surface, has been “finished off” for the exhibition, the final few drops of paint squeezed out to spatter onto the wall and floor. The dark red seen in Liar, 1998, the largest work in the show, is an extreme case of this kind of “assistance.” Still wet at the time of the show’s hanging, its skin was pulled off the metal panel on which it was laid and smeared around the edge and onto the wall, releasing a trapped liquid remainder that splashed down and puddled on the floor below. The tenuous status of Liar is exemplary. Completed or destroyed, a specifically installed object-painting whose functioning as a commodity is denied by its rootedness, it points up the ambiguous relation in Harding’s painting among the “finish,” “conclusion,” “end,” or “termination” of a work. While all the things these terms signify are in play in the making and viewing of the work, they are not congruent. It is never over.
—Michael Archer
