Gabriel Hartley: Skies

Seventeen, London, 6 May - 25 June 2022

The first thing that strikes me about these paintings: they look old. Not just old in the sense that they adopt a mid-twentieth century style. As objects they look worn, as if they've been lying around on the floor somewhere not being looked after. But they were made this year. 

In It never entered my mind, the fine cotton support has a dirty top edge. Late is torn in places. The same scrappy feeling comes through in Green Shadows, where you can see the wooden stretcher through the translucent canvas. And the frames: thin pieces of wood nailed to the canvases' sides, sort of nearly joining up with each other. 

This disdain for the object is at an unusual tangent to the delicate and delightful images in the paintings. I can imagine the ideal viewer of Hartley's paintings twingeing and murmuring in pleasure at the finely balanced compositions, completely absorbed, observing how the relationships between the marks and the materials gradually phase in and phase out of their awareness.

Unusually, the press release has something relevant to say about the work. William Pym writes that Hartley's concerns are the same as those of modernist painting in the mid-twentieth century, when painters were in thrall to critic Clement Greenberg and painting still took its own medium as its principal subject. 

Since the 1960s, people have generally abandoned their faith in the mysteries of the picture plane, and today painters are content to make pictures of things once more. So what does it mean to stick to the old modernist guns sixty years on, now that abstraction has lost its art-historical messianism, and is just one stylistic choice among many others?

With Hartley it feels like an aristocratic disregard for the changes that have happened to art over the last sixty years. This, combined with the paintings' tattiness, is in keeping with the lofty concerns of abstract painting in general, concerned more with essence than appearance. But this disregard comes at a price. Without the current of art history behind it, modernist-style abstraction risks becoming an increasingly rarefied form of visual pleasure, losing its ability to address the world it's in. Like an old lord in his manor: full of character, but missing what's going on in the nearby town, which no longer belongs to him.

Pym writes that modernism lost the art-historical battle, and the town was captured in the 1960s by the pop/conceptual/post-studio faction. But more battles have been fought since then, and today the town is dominated by a new master: the market. In a strategic act of clemency, the market allows all styles inside its walls and seeks to gloss over their conflicting histories. Anything goes, but the market decides what goes furthest. Perhaps this is behind the wilful shabbiness of Hartley's paintings: it's the symptom of modernism's bruised dignity, a sign of resentment towards the market, which sits on modernism's former throne, hostile to its cause and indifferent at best to its history.