WILLIAM DAVIE

Entering Marie Harnett’s latest exhibition What Was My Own in the lower gallery of Cristea Roberts, small-scale sliver-like pencil drawings, set within understated dark wood frames and expansive off white-coloured mounts, in front and to the right, coyly beckon you over as the graphite catches the light. But it is with an obligatory glance left, spying on the far wall the first of two large-scale drawings, Change the World, 2020, that your attention is truly seized. 

As is her custom, the drawing is of a still selected from a film trailer. It depicts a raucous audience encircling dancers performing the can-can inside a stately ballroom. The men wear dark suits, and the women wear expensive looking dresses with stylish hats, clapping along, cavorting. It’s a stylized image of a bygone era; living life to the full, or so you are led to believe. But two things disrupt this interpretation. First, a blinding whiteness that emanates from just above the performers, obscuring their faces. It’s as if you’ve just looked directly at a bright light and then back at the drawing. Second is that, now scanning the image more methodically, it quickly becomes apparent that the faces of the audience are also missing, the foreground and background dissolving into one another. 

In Harnett’s previous exhibition Still, the origins of the stills trapped the drawings in a state of flux because their sources were given in titles and the press release. Now, by not disclosing the origins of the stills, they are no longer of any significance other than to cosmetically set the mood. In this case, period films. Furthermore, by incorporating erasure and omission, used sparingly and carefully so that it never steals focus but reenforces intrigue and ambiguity, Harnett meticulously whittles each still into a standalone drawing. The result is that you have carte blanch to read into and interpret what you see while the presence of erasure and omission gently suggests a commonality of failing memory between them. 

This is aided by the fact that you must move - a lot - to see the drawings properly because of the extremes in scale. The two large scale drawings are around 150 centimetres wide and strike you with a sense of awe from a distance before you investigate them. The smaller drawings, no bigger than 25 centimetres wide, usually around 10 centimetres wide, at times, necessitates you to have your face against the glass of the frames. In doing this, you become acutely aware of the two distinct surfaces she works on. Drafting film, used for the first time, which gives a sleeker, photographic-like finish, and paper, which allows for a greater separation between tonal qualities and mark making.

With this, Harnett’s technical abilities and voice as an artist come alive. For example, in They're Here, 2020, a well-dressed woman turns her head to look behind her, her face obscured by her hat. She is rendered in soft greys in photo-realistic detail, but the background is where your focus is drawn. The group of figures she’s looking at are reduced to featureless cubist-like forms with areas of smooth, darker greys with even darker, looser outlines. This is then layered over by steep diagonal marks like cross hatching as if you were looking at it through a sheet of driving rain; both styles held in equilibrium by the drafting film. In Trust Me, 2020, she broaches more experimental territory. A barren tree not unlike a menorah, has been painstakingly rendered with minute lace-like intricacy, despite the drawing measuring only 4.4 by 3 centimetres. She has then smudged it with just enough vigour that it oscillates, appearing expressive like calligraphy in some areas and like a blurred photograph in others.  

In one of the strongest works, This Time, 2020, a romantically loaded moment between a man and a woman locking eyes is given its impetus because of Harnett’s ability to draw attention not to them, but to the light sources that illuminate the profiles of their faces. The paper gives the drawing a grainy quality. Harnett counters this by the way she translates the light so succulently, into a single continuous path as it falls over her philtrum, thinning out and then growing as it falls down her parted lips and rolling down her chin. It’s like catching a spider’s web glinting in the sun, a moment of unintended beauty. 

But it is in the exhibition’s swansong, the second large scale drawing, She Broke the Rules, 2019, where Harnett compiles everything together with devastating, lasting effect. Tucked away like a hallowed altarpiece, it comprises two stills overlapping one another; the most overt, a scene of two lovers intwined while having a secluded picnic in a forest. The second, less visible, is a snow scene. It’s steeped in melancholy as Harnett unceremoniously compresses the heat of young love together with the starkness of wintry decay like tectonic plates; leading you to ask: Am I the man or woman who was in the forest now trying to recall this youthful episode, before expanding to while considering the nature of the erasure and omission: is this the fate the waits for me and my cherished memories?

Up close, where the work can’t operate as a whole, you become aware of just how dexterous Harnett has been. Beyond the lovers rendered in exquisite detail, her mark making is freer, more expressive, akin to the background of They're Here. But at this scale it gives the graphite an irresistible painterly quality. The trees on the right, for example, vertical strips of densely compacted graphite, often with thin white highlights, seem like they could just as easily be a swathe of thick paint pulled across a canvas. As you hover inches away, the light shifts hypnotically across the darkened areas like it does on the surface of Soulages’ black paintings. Where the pale background above the lovers is segmented into new forms because of the darker outlines and forms seeping in from the image below like countries on a map, brush stroke-like areas in varying greys bleed into one another creating fascinating rhythms. A step left or right and new areas appear weaving in and out as others disappear. But never once does Harnett allow the work to even seem like it’s going to succumb to fatigue or overindulgence, the rich ecosystem is made more dynamic by the forgiving sheen of the drafting film. 

Stepping back and looking at the drawing as a whole again, it reverts, like stepping into cool shade having been stood in the sun. And, with a pang of sadness, you ask yourself again: is this the fate the waits for me?

First published by Doris
https://www.doris.press/blog/marie-harnett-what-was-my-own-21042021-by-william-davie

Marie Harnett: What Was My Own | Cristea Roberts
https://cristearoberts.com/exhibitions/226-marie-harnett-what-was-my-own/