Harold Ancart: Traveling Light

Painters, philosophers, and explorers alike have long shared a fascination with the sublime—that which exceeds the outer edges of understanding, the yet known and charted. Staring upon the infinite horizon lines of the land and sea, voyagers of ages past embarked into these unknowns, propelled by a common restlessness, a wanderlust, a desire to go places no one else had witnessed.

If there is one quality immediately evident upon meeting Harold Ancart, it is that same restlessness, the telltale energy and curiosity of the journeyman. The son of a flight attendant, Ancart spent his earliest days traveling in planes by his mother’s side, peering out of windows onto vast territories below. From a bird’s-eye view, he developed an abstracted relationship to the shapes and colors of the land beneath him, static forms glimpsed from oblique angles, while in motion.

These childhood experiences created a lifelong traveler out of Ancart, who struggles to this day to remain in one place for too long. Resistant to capture, he is drawn to ideas, places, and things that embody and encourage a feeling of freedom. He works as he lives: he addresses each canvas as if he were a flaneur, his final direction unplanned. He marches about, making decisions as he goes, drawn by the attractions of the terrain he paints from memory and the encounters he finds there.

Ancart chooses subjects in his work that grant him infinite compositional possibilities, emblems he returns to again and again, rendering them each time anew, changed, with their own respective mood, arrangement, and palette. Be it a tree or the infinitely receding horizon, his focus on scenes from our lived environments prompt potentially endless contemplation. His subjects are often elemental and eternal things, direct and familiar, which invite sustained looking, both by himself and his viewer.

An irony of this exhibition is that while the subjects featured in it are notionally calm, solid, and meditative, the works were each conceived very much in action, originating in a car. While driving on a French highway at a breakneck clip, Ancart became aware of the trees lining the highway in his peripheral vision. They formed a visceral impression, defined by speed and movement that was at once concrete and ethereal. De Kooning’s phrase “I’m like a slipping glimpser” comes to mind: the paintings of trees that Ancart subsequently made, in generously applied oil stick on large-scale canvases, re-create the sensate impression of that experience, making the transitory eternal. The subjects are cropped, almost indistinguishable, while the dense array of colors of the leaves, bark, and surrounding sky bleed into one another, creating an arresting blur.

In 2014, Ancart bought his first car as a US resident—a black Jeep Grand Cherokee—and set out from New York across the country. He converted the trunk of the car into a makeshift studio and along the way he painted twenty-seven small-scale paintings, which now belong to the Menil Collection in Houston. Most were painted en plein air. As always with Ancart’s work, the subjects are simple—a pine tree, a billboard, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty... Together these paintings map a line across the North American continent, tracing Ancart’s journey from New York to Los Angeles and his return through the Southern states. 

For a man who has always wandered in the pursuit of speed and freedom, this year’s lockdown presented numerous challenging constraints. Staying indoors for months on end is not an activity well-suited on its surface for a restless traveler such as Ancart. But if this moment’s restrictions appeared to him at first as obstacles, they ultimately served as detours, pointing him instead toward a different, less explored route. Forced inside, Ancart’s artistic practice became his means of travel, a portal to the world otherwise shut down. The act of painting meanwhile became a daily reprieve to channel his own restlessness, each work a meditative exercise in locating and feeling freedom on the canvas, where it was elsewhere precluded.