VINCENT HART There Is No Border Here

Istanbul Contemporary Art Fair 2018

‘There Is No Border Here’ is a solo exhibition that explores the meaning of art as an experience in the work of the artist Vincent Hart.

In his 1934 essay ‘Art as Experience’, philosopher and educator John Dewey writes that life is a flow of experience and describes what singles out a life-experience from the general stream so that we are left with an enduring memorial of a pleasant meal or a terrifying storm or a work of art. For Dewey, it is when that experience has reached its consummation or become whole. A work of art can be an intense and refined form of experience in which ‘different acts, episodes, occurrences melt and fuse into unity and yet do not disappear and lose their own character’.

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In Vincent Hart’s art, individual pieces’ merge and flow into one borderless experience, while retaining their individual character and identity. His triptych ‘Blue Boy’ directly shows this in its totality, but even at its edges, the outmost paintings, suggest a breaching of frontiers, hint at the work beyond the eye, complementing and converging with his other pieces, crossing freely into the imagination of the perceiver. The experience is immersive and suffused with openness.

Vincent unites colours, brushstrokes and materials borrowed from movements, artists and even single works of art, which he re-contextualises to create a painterly narrative that is intentionally left open as opposed to one that is so often hedged in as historically definitive.

His process realises the experience of creating art. His colours, shapes and forms merge into unity on timber-backed aluminium while those same acts of making can be scrutinised and taken alone, embodying Dewey’s description of an artist as both maker and perceiver. Seen in the gallery, his work emphasises the importance of experiencing art first hand, not filtered by computer screen or buffered by reproduction. The visitor undergoes a physical engagement, their eye following patterns and colours, taking different vantage points till moments are composed into a whole or till one is immersed in the flow.

Each of his works unites doing and undergoing, outgoing and incoming energy to make each piece an experience in itself, and experienced together, the perceiver is left with an experience of openness and unity.

‘There Is No Border Here’ is the first curatorial project to be featured at Contemporary Istanbul Fair. The show will run from 20-23 September 2018.