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Images and Dimensions of Time

By Wilhelm Christoph Warning (translated by Paula Domzalski)

Mark Harrington’s work challenges you to enter into the phenomenon of time and space. His paintings resemble a time-machine, encapsulating their own generic progress, preserving it for when the viewer sees the final work. The artist, however, erases handwriting, brushstroke, gesture – all traces of the process, which could recall its creation in time.

At first glance he reveals us nothing about the path he took to create the final image. Mark Harrington irritates his viewer. He creates the basic structure of his painting mechanically-technically. Taking saw-blades and peg-like tools – randomly found, specially selected or even fashioned by himself – he draws over and marks the soft surface, allowing a framework of lines to emerge as a base. This act has its origins in a not exactly definable, genre mix. On the one hand, it has to do with drawing, so it belongs to the genre of drawing. But on the other hand, it has a lot to do with sculpture. The painter, who once studied sculpture, works here with the dialectics of high and low, penetration and accentuation, positive and negative, letting a structural relief emerge.

A line-scape on to which he coats colour-layers – like a painter – and coats again and again with his spatula. The surface becomes flat and smooth. This also an imperceptible progress.

He says that he could imagine using other mechanical methods in his work. It is also not immediately apparent where he uses a brush. There are no typical painterly gestures to be found. Manual traces of individuality – which we have linked with the process of painting for thousands of years – are extinguished. Traces of the mode of origin are not to be seen. Behind all this is not only a de-individualization – a point tackled again and again in the history of Modern Art – but a “de-timing”, a timelessness. However, the artist does show the past and so creates a contradiction: working entirely with dialectics, he uses traces of the paintings’ origins almost imperceptibly in order to compose inner-pictorial structures, find rhythms, develop dynamics. Lines.

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