Replete with the artist’s signature graphic dynamism and electrifying coloration, Untitled is an exemplar of the paintings which have raised painter Harold Ancart to international acclaim in recent years. Within the towering canvas of the present work, a cosmic landscape blooms in a riotous frenzy, plunging the viewer into a storm of whirling confetti-like forms rendered in psychedelic colors. While the forms are readily identifiable as the artist’s signature floral motif, their astral coloration softens their legibility, as if these flowers bloom in a dreamscape beyond our reach. Working across the surface, Ancart has covered his rich surface with exuberant marks, brisk and generous, to create a painting that is alluring in its intensity and tactile fervor. Testament to Ancart’s acclaim in recent years, his artworks can be found in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Fondation Beyeler, Basel; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, amongst other prestigious institutions.

Within the present work, an effusion of chromatic growth blooms from an ebony bed. These vivid life forms mingle with the storm of astral confetti and lighting-like streaks which course through the dark ground, thrumming against the abundant field of inky darkness. Exemplified in the present work, an intriguing tension between representation and abstraction has always been at the heart of Ancart’s work, as has the exuberant, Day-Glo palette seen here. The artist first gained recognition for his paintings of flickering flames and extraterrestrial nightscapes; as in Untitled, his familiar forms are rendered exotic and mysterious through their brilliant coloration, which infuses his paintings with a tangible electricity. As Iona Whittaker observes, within the unfamiliar and fantastical space of Untitled, the colors “and the unruly shapes and fragments ferment a lurid but apparently consistent realm that might be Lilliputian or giant. The disorientation caused by their abstract ruptures on a dark plane breeds a near-uncanny or folkloric atmosphere.” (Iona Whittaker, “Review: Harold Ancart, C.L.E.A.R.I.N.G, New York, UK,” Frieze 21, October 2015 (online)) Another journalist reflects, "Ancart expresses the shared human desire to discover a sort of Utopia; a paradoxical venture toward simultaneous escapism and grounding." (Chinnie Ding, "Harold Ancart," Artforum, 19 June 2015 (online)) Indeed, there is something immediately alluring about the cosmic nightscape of Ancart’s canvas, which seems to exist on a heightened plane more beautiful and exciting than our own.

Striking a riveting balance between creative impulsion and studied composition, Ancart conjures myriad visual references that are sourced both from art history and the artist’s natural surroundings. Ancart describes himself 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.” (The artist quoted in: Julia Felsenthal, “Harold Ancart Brings His Kaleidoscopic Trees to Chelsea.” T: The New York Times Style Magazine, 8 September 2020 (online)) With their jagged forms and richly worked surfaces, Ancart’s paintings are often compared to that of Clyfford Still, as well as other American Abstract Expressionists.

Dodie Kazanjian, “How Small-Scale Paintings Became the Art World’s Big New Trend,” Vogue, 29 August 2016 (online)) The artist himself points to the unruly and emotive color of Egon Schiele and to the layered surfaces of Frank Auerbach as key influences. As journalist Chinnie Ding eloquently describes, “The history of painting that lives in these works like chromosomal traces enriches such dimensional unknowns. Fauvist and Symbolist flavors are joined by AbEx and Minimalist devices… Discrete veins of color and encroaching edges recall Clyfford Still’s seismic fissures, while the single pin-thin verticals of white paint suspended in two works seem equally mindful of Ab-Ex zips and Asian folding screens.” Speaking in terms particularly reminiscent of the present work, Ding concludes: “This is the planet of painting, after all, and Ancart’s space exploration is the exploration of painted space: More than depicting petals and flames, how might a painting itself grow like a flower, ignite like fire, and bring about forms that thrive as life-forms in the otherworld it always is?” (Chinnie Ding, op. cit.)