The familiarity of handball courts in parks and playgrounds across New York City can render them almost invisible. But seen through the eyes of Harold Ancart, an artist and immigrant who first encountered them after moving to the city from Brussels in 2007, these free-standing concrete walls are tableaux of beauty and fascination.
“The parallel between this vernacular phenomenon and historical abstract painting is remarkable,” says the 39-year-old painter, as he flips through Xeroxed photographs of some of the city’s 2,000-plus handball courts. With their many coats of slightly mismatched paint patching over areas of graffiti or damage and the patterns of wear from the rhythms of the game, these chance compositions echo abstractions by artists such as Mark Rothko, Kazimir Malevich and Adolph Gottlieb.
For his first public project in the US, which opened on 1 May and was commissioned by the Public Art Fund, Ancart has created an homage to these found works of art. Located in Cadman Plaza Park in downtown Brooklyn, Subliminal Standard is a 16ft-high concrete wall bisecting a concrete floor. Ancart has painted all four vertical and horizontal planes of the wall and base, evoking the game’s lines of play as well as presenting his own slightly surreal riff on handball’s naturally occurring abstractions.
“I hope it’s going to be a contemplative object that is just going to come out of nowhere,” says the artist. On one side, molten red vertical bands at the two outer edges frame a lower half of snowy white and an upper expanse of beige, all dappled with smudgy purplish patches of paint and the glancing shadows of nearby trees. The implied landscape on the flip side sparkles more radiantly, with a grey-blue ground set against a blotchy yellow sky. A ghostly block of white hovers on the horizon line like a distant mountain or iceberg. “I wanted both sides different enough so that you feel like you’re at a different time of the day or in a different environment,” he says.