BLAU INTERNATIONAL Edition by Harold Ancart

“What’s better to paint than things you can contemplate?” Harold Ancart asks. As rhetorical as that question may be, the answer can be found in each of his paintings—mountains, waves, flowers, campfires. Born in Brussels in 1980 and currently at home in New York, Ancart has developed a visual language over the past decade that might have matched Clyfford Still’s, that is, if Still had been stranded with a complete set of crayons on the Black Island from Tintin. Whether impressing viewers at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, with a series of miniature paintings made in the back of his pick-up on a road trip across America or stealing the show with a 38 × 111-centimeter site-specific painting at the Centre Pompidou in Metz, Harold Ancart never fails to master his format—which is what makes him one of the most distinctive painters of his generation. For BLAU International, Ancart created a large-format print in the shape of a matchbox that takes up his contemplative Ur-motif. Anyone with eyes can see: it’s on fire.

HAROLD ANCART
Lux (BLAU), 2019
Lithograph on pure cotton
paper, Arches 270 gr.
27 1/4 × 37 in. / 69 × 94 cm
Edition of 12
Printed by Bruno Robbe, Frameries, Belgium
Image courtesy David Zwirner