The Belgian painter Harold Ancart, 40, lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, but spends his days in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in a ground-floor studio strewn with errant bits of clothing, Ping-Pong paddles, tomato plants and astonishing quantities of oil sticks, his medium of choice. On a recent visit, one corner held several plinths topped with cast concrete reliefs of miniature swimming pools. (Colorfully painted, they appeared like three-dimensional riffs on Josef Albers’s squares.) On the walls hung massive canvases depicting individual trees, and two sprawling triptychs — a mountain scene and a seascape, painted in homage to murals by the Swiss-Californian artist Gottardo Piazzoni (1872–1945). Ancart saw them a few years ago in San Francisco at the de Young Museum and was moved by what he described as their “naïve, quiet beauty.”
Much of this work will appear later this month in “Traveling Light,” the artist’s first New York solo show with David Zwirner Gallery. The
exhibition’s title is a triple entendre that references Ancart’s preferred mode of travel (carry-on only); his effort to shed the “heavy luggage” of art historical precedent in his work; and the physics of how light carries color from a painting’s surface to the eye. Movement is a theme in Ancart’s art and in his life — from his decision to immigrate to the United States after art school in Brussels to his breakthrough body of work, a series of drawings he made in the back of his car while on a cross-country road trip, which were later exhibited at the Menil Collection in Houston (some of the pieces for this show was created in Los Angeles, where Ancart temporarily decamped during the Covid-19 pandemic). He compares making his paintings to taking the kind of walk where you don’t chart a course, and on his studio door he’s stenciled the words “Grand Flâneur.” It’s a sort of self-imposed nickname — not, as he puts it, in the “19th century lazy dandy” sense, but rather as “one who walks around and tries to isolate poetic moments out of the everyday urban landscape. I think that’s how I’ve learned to be an artist: walking the streets, not torturing myself in a studio.”
That wasn’t always the case. Ancart’s early love of drawing led him, in 2001, to enroll at art school at Belgium’s École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuel de la Cambre, where postconceptualism was in fashion and his teachers insisted that painting was dead. He now laughs at the notion — “if painting died, it was for two minutes between 1981 and 1992” — but it took him years, and a trans-Atlantic relocation, to deprogram. These days, he rejects the notion that his art should have to mean anything at all, a philosophy firmly rooted in the belief that there’s nothing new under the sun. “The idea of wanting to do something new,” he cheerfully declares: “I find that pretty stupid.” When it comes to painting, Ancart seems both intense and playful, the latter impression reinforced by the fact that he often spends his days on the floor, scribbling on his canvases with souped-up Crayolas. His compositions seem to take a page from Pop Art, or at least from the comic books he’s read since elementary school. But his surfaces, smudged and gouged with the imprint of his oil sticks — he likes that the medium offers “nowhere to hide” — have none of Pop Art’s factory-smooth flatness.