Harding's grid-play reflects order and chaos

Much abstract art is based on the grid. Alexis Harding, who has a show at the Rubicon Gallery in Dublin, began with that but has pushed its boundaries, writes AIDAN DUNNE

A GEOMETRIC GRID underpins abstract painting. For example, it’s visibly there in the work of Piet Mondrian or Sean Scully, implicitly in the work of Mark Rothko. It turns up in numerous guises from early in the 20th century to the present day.

London-born Alexis Harding, who graduated from Goldsmiths College in 1995, built his reputation with a series of paintings that systematically set about distorting and often destroying the grid. In the course of doing so, he spent a lot of time watching paint dry.

His method was to pour gloss paint in parallel lines on to a surface coated with wet oil paint. That was the quick part. Then followed the slow, incalculable part of the process, as he monitored the progress of the gradually drying paint.

Initially the works were laid flat on the ground until they formed a dry skin, then hung vertically on the wall. Gravity set to work, dragging the mass of underlying paint downwards, stretching, distorting and often sundering the calm geometry of the grid.

No matter how familiar Harding became with the process, chance played such a major role that there was a high rate of failure. On many occasions the painting would simply dissolve into an incoherent mess. But a sizeable fraction produced results that were striking and even beautiful. Because he often used vibrant colours there was sometimes a playful quality to the finished pieces.

On the face of it, it sounds as if he was making art about art, slyly undermining the grid that had become synonymous with modernism. As time went by, though, his overtly abstract paintings, failed grids, began to look more and more as if they were actually about what was going on in the world. They read as symbolic meditations on order and chaos, from the realm of the small-scale and personal to the large-scale and public. From, say, the vicissitudes of emotional life to major disruptive events, including natural and man-made disasters.

Fruitful as this pictorial pattern was, he has really matured as an artist in the past five or six years by seriously extending and developing it. His current, outstanding show at the Rubicon Gallery, Tondos Bi-Products, provides a good overview of how he has done so. The accurately named byproducts are generated by the working process and in turn become works themselves. For years he’s made small pieces by applying discarded paint to the cardboard covers of copies of a catalogue of his work published in 2003. These little studies have a spontaneity and humour that are very appealing, but they are also clearly related to the larger paintings that indirectly inspired them.

They’re companion pieces to that more formal work, and also a commentary on it.

Other recycled byproducts are rolls of discarded, paint-covered masking tape, methodically stacked and stored in a bin. The packed bin makes a curiously satisfying sculpture.

In his recent paintings he moves on from the straightforward grids. In one series it is as if he focuses on and enlarges a single line from the grid and subjects it to the familiar distorting process. The resultant wavering, fragile, sometimes broken forms can appear living, even human. Another series, including the tondos, features rainbow bands of colour that slide and merge and fracture.

The largest tondo on view, World View (orange through purple), is appositely titled. It brings to mind a view of Earth as a globe in space. More than that, it evokes the dramas of climate and geology, of colliding tectonic plates and violent storms. Again, Harding’s apparently abstract art turns out to reflect the nature of the world we inhabit, an unstable realm of earthquakes and other everyday catastrophes.

Alexis Harding: Tondos Bi-Products, Rubicon Gallery, 10 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, until May 21st; rubicongallery.ie