Landskip, series in progress, oil on paper mounted on plywood
Courtesy of artist’s studio
GM: These new landscapes have emerged in a minimalist, essential language. Some of these works are like train windows or curved airplane windows. There is the idea of something speeding supersonically by – yet a suspended sense of stillness is maintained. The images are visibly also objects; with their rounded top edges. The eye is pulled into the composition at the horizon line, but the unfocused flatness of the surface creates a state of fluctuation, gently pushing the gaze back into the world. I wonder where these works come from and what relation they have with their source material, if they are for you an act of internalising a vast landscape or perhaps the externalisation of an inner feeling, or both.
JH: The paintings came from the immediate landscape outside the studio. They were initially done as a way of engaging more directly with the environment here in rural Italy, where I live, through observation and colour sampling between August to December of last year. The long depth you get with the horizontal field draws you in like you said, but hopefully the fact that they are presented as multiples evidences the spaces between them as much as the visual space created within each one. I am more interested in this area between and around the pieces and in the physical quality of the paintings as objects than in the idea of a series of illusionistic landscapes. I think this is because I’m trying to create the feeling of a much larger field of painting where these are only a few fragments. The more paintings there are, the larger the horizon becomes.
The form of the landscape, using it as an image, a framework from which to work – is useful because it references windows, which are a sort of favourite source-material for me at the moment. I like the fact that when you think of a window it’s an object in itself, but you also use it to see outside. It may sound obvious but sometimes you forget this, and I work to try and point out the material qualities of the object before you can ‘see through it’. This is why the edges are curved, to disturb the illusionary plane and to create a back and forth between the two readings.
GM: Are these finished?
JH: The images themselves are finished as individual parts; the display mechanism not yet.
I need to understand how to hang them, in terms of the separation from each other in order to potentialise their in-between spaces. I’m thinking a lot about Judd and Irwin, the relationship between the art object and its environment. I’m asking myself if whether to appreciate the work it’s better to activate the environment, rigorously controlling it, or if a painting can be introduced that changes the environment simply by being in it.
GM: This is the first time I see you working in fragments, expanding this modular way of making into the curation of your work. You are creating an environment without having to physically modify the whole environment, unlike what you did for the Soft Furnishinginstallatory exhibition in São Paulo (2019). There you showed these meticulous gradient paintings with tiles to match them on the floor and wallpaper made especially for the pieces lining the gallery. Interestingly, it became really difficult to remove those objects once they had been contextualized in that setting. The problem was you were still trying to present them as individual pieces afterwards, and they had acquired a sort of ‘aura’ whilst being in that space. The other opposite would be your rain-room installation Spring / Horizon for the CultRise Aurore group show in Rome (2017), a whole experiential environment without a single loose item. I’m wondering if you often think about where the work is going to be shown when you make it and how much of that kind of thinking has shaped these investigations of single object VS installation in the last three years.
Soft Furnishing, Installation Shot, LAMB São Paulo, 2019
Oil on Paper on Plywood with Custom Wallpaper and Printed Tiles
Excerpt from Spring / Horizon, documentation video on artist’s website
Plaster, Steel, Wood, Plasterboard with Irrigation System, 2017
JH: I find this a very interesting dilemma. On the one hand I get great joy from full blown experiential installations, but the necessity of heavy installation work tied to a single place, more likely than not towards an extremely short lived moment, bothers me. There is a reduction in accessibility in the sense that the redisplay of these works is very rare, and in general, they rely too much on the superstructures of galleries, museums and a high rank of specialised collectors. It is an over said thing, but we live very wastefully and the minimalist doctrine has a large draw on me for this reason. Irwin changed an entire room with a single piece of black tape. I would really like to be able to create individual paintings that can exude that sort of influence over a multitude of distinctly different spaces, from the gallery to domestic settings. And that the effect they have, whatever it is, multiplies drastically when they are brought into close contact with each other. Ha! It’s a big ask.
Studies for Landskip, oil on paper, artist’s frame.
GM: These small framed landscapes sit quite comfortably within their frame, each one exuding its own subtle message yet content in its group setting. In the row to the right, the rectangular images seem to want to wiggle away, there is something humorous, flag-like, sensual about them, maybe in relation to the more sober left column. Modifying their form shifts the narrative of the work, these wavy pieces seem much more energetic and sculptural than their rectangular counterparts. I wanted to know more about how these works responded to each other and how you are thinking about the integration of sculpture and painting in your practice.
JH: These all emerged as the original studies of the larger Landskip series. The more rectangular pieces are read as horizon lines and let your eye recede into the picture plane. The ones on the right were treated as if the light and darker tones were high and low points on a piece of sculpture, as if light was falling across a curved form, which is accentuated by cutting the paper. The relation you have with the work becomes much closer and it becomes more immediate within your realm of palpability. Again, it’s that play of trying to evidence the object whilst also providing the illusion of a deep landscape. I am increasingly looking for these multiple depths working together on a single plane.
I am also thinking about digital screens here and how the images that they display seem to have a certain fluid quality to them. Even if materially we know the screen is solid, the image on the screen of a plasma television seems to lose all sense of ‘objectness’. I think painting holds the solidity of the image much more, and the cut-out forms of the support of these works forces you to relate to them both as images and also as objects in the room. The image then becomes inextricably linked to the painting’s own sculptural form. I think overall I’m trying to see what happens when illusionary images also function as projections of their underlying structures, and exploring ways to make apparent their material-object origins.
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