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TOMAS HARKER, Cut the Distance, 2024

A disordered world

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TOMAS HARKER
Frontierism, 2024
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TOMAS HARKER
Initiation, 2022

Tomas Harker‘s paintings don’t just explore the blurred line between fantasy and reality – they challenge it. In his latest exhibition, The Lightness of Being, Harker weaves together cultural references, painterly textures, and philosophical musings to confront the uncertain terrain of contemporary life. In this interview, he unpacks the hidden forces shaping our world, the evolving nature of the self, and how his art becomes a visual commentary on a world in free fall.

hube: Your paintings often blur the lines between fairytale and reality, particularly in works like Multiple Choice Fairytale Ending. How do you think this ambiguity resonates with the uncertainties of contemporary life?

Tomas Harker: To me, this resonates because superstitions about what is real and what is not have moved from the fringe to the mainstream. The hyper-normal turmoil of distinguishing between ‘the real world’ and ‘the fake world’ is now a condition of contemporary life.

Behind the every day, it can seem as though a hidden logic is operating on a higher ontological level. It could be the invisible hand of economics, vast flows of information, Kafkaesque bureaucracies, or something with more benevolent omnipotence. Fairy tales and folklore are often cautionary, giving physical form to unseen forces. 

h: In your recent exhibition The Lightness of Being, you explore the relationship between the self and the world through a veil-like softness in your compositions. How did you develop this idea of the painting as a ‘mediator’ between reality and belief?

TH: The physical qualities of the medium of paint are endlessly fascinating. There is a slippage between the physical object and what is represented, which defies absolute characterisation. I was thinking of the self as an amorphous and transient medium. Below the surface, representation is essentially unknowable. Rather than using the paintings to illustrate, I wanted them to rhyme with or perform this idea.

h: Power dynamics and uncertainty are strong themes in your work. How do you approach translating such abstract, societal concerns into visual narratives without overwhelming the viewer?

TH: The paintings do have the potential to be overwhelming. I think they work best when they offer one reading while simultaneously undermining it – it’s a kind of balancing act. I try to avoid them becoming prescriptive or didactic. I aim to create paintings that can function on their own in the world, standing independently of what I was thinking about during their creation – to make them bearable on an immediate level.

h: Your pieces often feature iconic cultural references, like David Bowie in Persona. How do these references fit into the broader themes of identity and mediation that you explore?

TH: This reference came from Cracked Actor, a 1975 documentary by Alan Yentob. The visual metaphor of the mask translated well into the painting. Popular references often feel like non-linear, broken fragments of something familiar. I reference pieces of pop culture when they are useful or too tempting to resist. In my mind, the mask paintings were also referencing the Belgian painter James Ensor, who spent his life painting carnivalesque masks.

h: Your work balances between abstraction and representation, especially in The Lightness of Being. How do you decide how much to reveal or obscure in a piece? Is there a balance you aim for, or is it intuitive?

TH: This goes back to the idea that what lies beneath surface representation is unknowable. The painterly devices are all referencing photography and film – things like being out of focus, overexposure, reflections, cropping. These are all methods of obscuring, of delaying instant definition. There is also a balance between the pictorial and the direct gestures of paint, which, after a certain point, is about accepting it for what it is.

h: The textures in your recent paintings are especially striking. In works like Set You Free and Frontierism, how do you use texture and surface to convey emotional or philosophical ideas?

TH: The textures are an attempt to describe or rhyme with the subject. They are soft, out of reach, and evoke nostalgia, but they also have a translucent, spectral quality. It’s a hint at fabrication, at illusion. The texture can also re-align the feeling of the original subject; it can help create a push-and-pull between discomfort and seduction. I’m thinking about what is not shown – the murkiness and ambivalence of hidden depths.

h: You’ve talked about the ‘cosmic order becoming increasingly disordered’ in the modern world. How do your paintings, particularly in this recent exhibition, act as a response or commentary on this disarray?

TH: The way we make sense of the raw data of the world is through a symbolic order, a shared language of signs and signifiers. Through the abstraction of the physical world to a virtual one – Third Nature, as the writer McKenzie Wark termed it – aesthetics take on an untethered semiotic capital. This is a world in free-fall, a copy without an original. This last exhibition was beginning to pick at the corporatisation of self. It’s the subjective self in crisis, becoming a medium for a new form of semiotic capital.

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TOMAS HARKER
Energy lines, 2020
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TOMAS HARKER
Superstitious-Chintz, 2023
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TOMAS HARKER
Persona, 2024
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TOMAS HARKER
The Lightness of Being exhibition view, 2024
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TOMAS HARKER
The Lightness of Being exhibition view, 2024

h: Your early works, like A Sea in Suspense, had a surreal and almost dreamlike quality, while The Lightness of Being feels more contemplative and grounded. How do you feel your artistic voice has evolved over the years?

TH: I’ve always had the same constellation of interests, but the work has moved between them. At the time of making A Sea in Suspense, I was thinking a lot about transcendence and presence. But you tend to drop things and pick them back up again, sometimes years later. There’s an element of progress and drawing deeper into specific concepts, which keeps me moving.

h: In The Lightness of Being, the concept of the veil is central, with the works described as ‘concealing the transient nature of being’. What inspired this approach, and how does it connect to the larger themes of your artistic practice?

TH: In previous shows, there was a focus on the object. In this show, I wanted to flip that and look more at the subject. The object and subject have a co-dependent relationship. It’s similar to the marketing concept, where to create the consumable object, you must create the consuming subject. But this has developed into something more all-encompassing today. It’s how the self is affected by these economies that connects to the broader practice.

h: You’ve exhibited in spaces like The Sunday Painter and Nicodim Gallery. How do these environments shape how your work is received by audiences, especially in exhibitions like The Lightness of Being?

TH: Each gallery has a nuanced audience and approach to how they function, which unavoidably shapes how the work is apprehended. Some of the references might come across more clearly in the UK. But for the location of The Lightness of Being, I had a somewhat naïve idea of Los Angeles, which clearly came through in the paintings. The work has been received on different levels, sometimes duplicitously so. Ultimately, how the work is received is down to each individual, and I’m happy for that to be the case.

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TOMAS HARKER
Highway Hypnosis, 2022

Images courtesy of the artist

ISSUE 5

FW24 ISSUE IS HERE