Richard Hearns:
The Living Mountain
These atmospheric paintings of Richard Hearns impart intimations of nature in contest with the material reality of oil on canvas. In these considerably abstract landscapes, allusions to panoramic terrains and glimmers of luminosity are revealed through spartan configurations and painterly coloration.
Undulating between representation and abstraction, these aerial compositions halt definable perspective, unfolding perception’s temporality. The unrestrained brushstrokes and gesturally expressive marks at once generate and disrupt the illusion of space, embodying the phenomenological insights of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty on space, time, perspective and the subject’s perception of the world: “The thing and the world exist only in so far as they are experienced by me or by subjects like me, since they are both the concatenation of our perspectives, yet they transcend all perspectives because this chain is temporal and incomplete.”[1]
Suspended between the elemental structure of a landscape and nonrepresentational painting, these gestural explorations of Hearns prompt discursive exchanges with primarily representational works by such forerunners of modernism as J. M. W. Turner, James McNeill Whistler and Claude Monet, along with thoroughly abstracted works by such Abstract Expressionist and Color Field painters as Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Helen Frankenthaler.
Richard Hearns, The Living Mountain, 2024. Oil on canvas, 70 by 272 inches. Artwork © Richard Hearns. Photo: Pietra Studio. Courtesy of the Cadogan Gallery.
Comprised of five medium-scale panels and standing apart in its representational legibility from the other paintings of this exhibition, The Living Mountain (2024) is a partly illusory and partly credible depiction of the Turlough Mountain in the Burren, a glaciated karst landscape of limestone rock covering a vast area on and near the western coast of Ireland.
Viewed from a far distance, the painting appears as a relatively cohesive representation of nature and its limitlessness, where bodies of water, rocky lands, grasslands and the sky prompt our phenomenological approach in fathoming the world. As the observer proceeds toward the canvases to examine them up close, the painterly contours perceived from afar as depictions of legible parts of the landscape appear as ad hoc traces of the brush, echoing the thoughts of Merleau-Ponty on the conundrum of our constantly shifting perception of the world: “There is nothing to be seen beyond our horizons, but other landscapes and still other horizons, and nothing inside the thing but other smaller things.”[2]
Richard Hearns, Zenith, 2023. Oil on canvas, 24 by 18 inches. © Richard Hearns. Photo: Pietra Studio. Courtesy of the Cadogan Gallery.
Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1872. Courtesy of the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.
The gesturally exuberant painting of Hearns titled Zenith (2023) comes across as primarily abstract, though it also registers as a notable tribute to Monet’s seminal painting Impression, Sunrise (1872) of the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris. In Zenith, Hearns has essentially maintained Monet’s overall palette of orange, blue and green, although the compositional elements now give way to a sense of an undefinable location, the dissolution of a vantage point and thorough abstraction. These paintings of Monet and Hearns touch upon the phenomena of vision and temporality in relation to landscapes, our perception of the world and the painterly process. Addressing perception, visuality and temporality, Merleau-Ponty reflects: “I have the impression that the world itself lives outside me, just as absent landscapes live on beyond my visual field, and as my past was formerly lived on the earlier side of my present.”[3]
Richard Hearns, Meridian, 2023. Oil on canvas, 24 by 18 inches. © Richard Hearns. Photo: Pietra Studio. Courtesy of the Cadogan Gallery.
J. M. W. Turner, Waves Breaking Against the Wind, c. 1840. Courtesy of the Tate, London.
Chromatically, compositionally and thematically, three striking paintings by Hearns recall Turner’s seascape Waves Breaking Against the Wind (c. 1840) of the Tate: Meridian, Opalescent and Oracle, all dated 2023. Whereas Turner placed the emphasis on the formlessness of water, the upsurge of waves and the translucence of mist, curtailing the painting’s topographic setting, Hearns articulates his compositions of nature through fluid gestures and drips of thinned oil, where volatile marks give rise to referential forms as steadily as they dissolve them.
In Merdian, the abstracted iconography of a landscape is a sum of emblematic marks that bring about some sense of perspective, only to obliterate illusion through nebulous brushmarks and the raw materiality of oil. These paintings of Hearns recall the thoughts of Merleau-Ponty on our perception of the world: “I cannot conceive the world as a sum of things, nor time as a sum of instantaneous ‘present moments’, since each thing can offer itself in its full determinacy only if other things recede into the vagueness of the remote distance, and each present can take on its reality only by excluding the simultaneous presence of earlier and later presents.”[4]
Richard Hearns, Landmark 1, 2024. Oil on canvas, 39 by 39 inches. © Richard Hearns. Photo: Pietra Studio. Courtesy of the Cadogan Gallery.
James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne, 1875-80. Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania.
Hovering on the edges of abstraction and figuration, the austere oil painting Landmark I (2024) of Hearns recalls Whistler’s ethereal Nocturne (1875-80) of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Executed through vibrant gestures in shades of pine green, midnight blue and light grey combined with hints of pale pink, Landmark I imparts a sense of the unfamiliar and nameless. Exuding the sheer materiality of the medium that nonetheless suggests our optical grasp of the vaporous elements of nature, Landmark I prompts Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the primordial world, a pre-human world that is in a constantly changing process while being perceived.
As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write, “Phenomenology needs art as logic needs science; Erwin Straus, Merleau-Ponty, or Maldiney need Cézanne or Chinese painting.”[5] The layered traces of brushstrokes and accidental drips of color on the surface of Landmark I emanate sensations of raindrops falling upon real and imaginary mountains, valleys, plains and bodies of water under the opaque sky. These evocative paintings of Hearns acclaim and rearticulate the aesthetic paths envisaged by Cézanne and Chinese painting.
Notes
1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (1962; London: Routledge, 1995), p. 333.
2. Merleau-Ponty, p. 333.
3. Merleau-Ponty, pp. 333-4.
4. Merleau-Ponty, p. 333.
5. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 149.
Richard Hearns, installation view. Artwork © Richard Hearns. Photo: Pietra Studio. Courtesy of the Cadogan Gallery.