As if by Osmosis
Candida Stevens Gallery is delighted to present ‘As if by Osmosis’, a joint exhibition of new works by Kerry Harding, an English painter based in North Cornwall, and Lucas Reiner, an American painter with studios in Los Angeles and Porto. Both artists look to their surroundings for inspiration, focusing on the same subject matter for months or even years at a time. In Harding’s case, this is the coastal landscape that wraps around her and for Reiner it is the growth of trees within urban environments. Through these acts of sustained observation both artists have absorbed the ways in which external factors such as the weather, seasons, time and human intervention affect their subject matter, developing an understanding and connection that goes far beyond the visual. This level of intimacy is evident in their paintings, which soothe and disarm the viewer in equal measure.
Integral to both artists is the way they embrace the permeability of their chosen fabrics. Harding will often find the starting point for a new work on the back of existing canvases, guided by the marks that oils and bleaches have made from seeping through the canvas. A fortuitous incident earlier this year for Reiner, meanwhile, has led to an unorthodox approach to tempera painting on muslin, in which he applies preparatory gesso to the back of the fabric, pushing the substance through the weave to produce an irregular painting surface. For both artists, the element of chance and surrendering control to their materials is an important aspect of how they infuse their paintings with history and character.
Sharing the same earthly palette of blues, greys, yellows and reds, intriguing parallels between the ways both artists work begin to reveal themselves and provide an enriched viewing experience. The fragmentary and abstracted nature of Reiner’s work is complemented by the timeless and otherworldly feel of Harding’s landscapes. These are paintings not defined by the physical elements they represent but by the interaction between and sense of magnitude embedded in the shapes and layers used to form them.
Kerry Harding
Kerry Harding has always been a physical painter, turning, pouring and scraping her canvases as she seeks to convey a deeper understanding of her subject matter than its physical attributes alone. She describes moving to the coast of north Cornwall over twenty years ago as the moment when the landscape around her finally matched her way of working, the rugged coastline reflected in her weathered canvases. Living amongst her subject matter, every errand or task is an opportunity for the coastal landscape to absorb into her psyche, the unconscious assimilation of its characteristics at any time of day, in any weather and every season, that has led to an intimate understanding of its beauty.
The impact of this constant connection with her surroundings is palpable within a trio of large, square paintings that, despite depicting the same section of headland, are strikingly different in appearance and mood. One, with striped sky and mottled trees, immerses you in Cornish mizzle. Another, with blue, pink and yellow streaks in the sky will remind many of the aurora borealis that has delighted so many people in the south of England this year. Through an enduring proximity with an environment that is endlessly changeable and unpredictable, Harding has captured something of the timelessness of nature within her paintings that cannot be communicated in any single photograph.
Preventing any attempts to read her paintings as ‘traditional’ landscapes, Harding employs a number of pictorial techniques that purposefully disrupt each scene and challenge the viewer’s perceptions. This is beautifully demonstrated by a series of eight small-scale paintings that are unified by pine trees, trunks bent by the wind and canopies defiant as they project upwards. Highly detailed cloudscapes and rippling waves are overlaid by the trees, some presented as blackened silhouettes that seem almost cut out from the canvas, some appearing to be formed entirely of their surroundings as translucent shapes that mirror the scenery around them. The effect is such that the eye cannot easily decipher foreground from background, horizon from coast line, or sea from sky, to create a forever changing impression of the landscape.
Citing Bridget Riley as a lasting influence, Harding’s interest in the optical-illusory potential of painting is evident in this latest body of work. From the use of stripes to modulate skies with unnerving regularity, the diffraction of paint to almost pointillist effect, to her ability to reproduce clouds and seas in hyper-realistic detail, Harding shares Riley’s ambition to challenge the viewer to be cognisant of the physicality of looking. Oscillating between highly detailed representation and surrealist impressions, Harding’s paintings elicit a range of emotions from unsettled to meditative that reflect the landscape’s continuing ability to surprise and delight the artist herself.
Harding speaks of her studio with passion, a private space where her need to paint is unleashed and she is free to make the mess her practice demands. By the time the artist completes a body of work, the floor is covered in great splashes of blue, white and grey paint, reminiscent of a great swathe of foamy sea spray cast off from the waves of painted canvases hung around the room. Knowing she has an affinity for the allegorical romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), one can almost imagine Harding in her studio standing before her paintings as an incarnation of Friedrich’s most famous compositional device, the rückenfigur - a person standing with their back to us, contemplating the expanse of nature before them and soaking it all in.
Lucas Reiner
Showing with Candida Stevens Gallery for the first time, Lucas Reiner is known for his distinctive depictions of singular urban trees that invite contemplation on a range of themes, including the passing of time and human relationships with nature. His early work, Los Angeles Trees (2001-2012), explored the ways in which trees planted in urban environments serve as a metaphor for the futility of human desire to control nature and, in turn, the resilience of nature to respond to such attempts. More recently, Reiner has begun to consider clusters of trees in his compositions, examining the ways in which the tree structures interact and connect spaces beneath and between them, and the ways in which their presence can be understood through the abstraction of these forms.
Reiner’s new series, Benito Juárez, is named after the airport in Mexico City outside which the artist noticed small groves of trees positioned amidst the concrete and tarmac of the airport’s entrance. Planted, presumably, to soften this harsh urban landscape, there is an irony to the topiary of these trees, the canopies of which have been shaped into perfect cubes and rectangles held up in the air and denied their organic forms. Although initially drawn to their presence as further examples of the human desire to control nature, it was the beauty in the interconnectivity of their forms and potential symbolism held within those spatial relationships that Reiner felt compelled to explore.
Building on themes he began considering in Inglewood Cathedral (2023), in which the artist explored the idea that trees along a boulevard could function as the doorway to a sacred space in their formation of light-filtered passageways and arches, Reiner considered the spaces that exist between and beneath the canopies of the Benito Juárez trees. He noticed how the forms could be read as an abstracted representation of human relationships, in which their interactions could be seen to symbolise obstruction, support or space, depending on the subjective reading of its viewer.
Taking this line of inquiry further, Reiner followed cubist principles in reducing the three-dimensional forms to their geometric shapes and flattening perspective to remove any sense of foreground and background. The result is a series of intriguingly delicate paintings in which the trees no longer form the focus and instead exist as impressions on a landscape, ranging from silhouettes to ghostly imprints. Presented almost as cross-sections of earth, expanses of yellow beneath the trees remind us of their connection to the soil below, whilst tree and sky are shown as unified forms that merge and alternate until there is little left to differentiate them. In these works, we are reminded that there can be no preclusion of trees from nature, regardless of the incongruity of their placement.
Painted onto hand-cut pieces of muslin mounted onto wood, each work in the series differs slightly in size and shape that reflect the individuality of the trees they portray. Incomplete borders and cropped compositions emphasise their fragmentary appearance, appearing almost as historical artefacts of a larger story within history. Transcending the boundary between painting and object, Reiner’s interest in religious icons reveals itself. Indeed, there is one particular work, the Icon of the Triumph of Orthodoxy (c1400), housed in the British Museum, that captivates him. Featuring two saints holding icons and the Icon of the Hodegetria (depicting the Madonna and Child) protected by guardian angels, this small wooden panel celebrates the moment in Byzantine orthodoxy when veneration of the icon as a sacred image returned. This belief in the power of imagery to have agency over the viewer resonates with Reiner. Having focused for so many years on the ways in which trees are governed by human intervention, he has begun to question whether their identity can in fact be detached from the anthropomorphised viewpoint to which we are programmed to read nature (and the representation of nature in art), to the point where such trees can be appreciated for their agency alone.
Essay by Isabella Joughin
