Mark Harrington

Spaces in between
Mark Harrington’s works could seem like purely formal experiments. For the artist, however, they are more than that. He wants his painting to have an effect, for the canvas to evoke a mood in the viewer, a mood that is initially hidden in the material behind the surface.
Harrington believes in a sensual, emotional and even spiritual dimension to his work. But his but his paintings also make the viewer think, questions arise: are his works, which as ditpychen always consist of two parts, a search for the balance of the elements? Is it about harmony and balance, stability and dynamics, continuity and pauses, symmetry and differences, order and disorder?
Alternating between the intransigent, hermetically sealed on the one hand and the light and sensual on the other, between the strange and the seductively beautiful, the pictures reveal their diversity ni the logic of reduction.
The surfaces leave an irritation: they are smooth, soft and muted, and although the lines seem to be embedded in the painted background like marquetry, as if they were behind a veil, the colours seem luminous and brilliant!
The large rectangles Mark Harrington produces are repeatedly sanded, then covered with several layers of gesso mixture and sanded again until a Renaissance fresco finish is achieved. In this way, his paintings are reminiscent of objects, partly because of the solid wooden structure that supports the canvas. on which then lies a thick layer of acrylic paint.
As with fresco, colours are applied in complex layers at great speed while the fast-drying gesso is still wet, thus pigments are absorbed ni the surface and do not bind on it, but (as in fresco) in its interior. The colours work and are inseparable from
the structures that hold them.
The artist works quickly and freehand. but however controlled and perfected the process may be through
his experience may be, there is always also a quick, unpredictable intuition which counterplay to his conceived composition.
This process of “discovering-while-doing” is not necessarily a surrealistic automatism or a quest from the world of ideas of the of the existentialists, but arises inevitably out of the from the demands of his technique, his materials and his body.
Because Harrington makes a point of emphasising the physicality of the works, he creates nuanced transitions between opacity and transparency, between hard edges and colour bleeding. As a final step, Harrington covers the painted bands. He adds a semi-transparent pigment, a milky pigment that continues to veil the colour, soften the edges and bind the gesso-chalk mixture before it is wiped off while still wet. This further blurs image and object, further emphasising the traditional interactions between two and three dimensions that defined pre-modern and modern 1997 painting. The sculptural effect is that the paint recedes even further into the background, our consciousness expands to such an extent that paint and image and wood become one.