Christopher Hartmann
Domus Maubourg, Paris, France
Organized by BLUM and Nassima Landau
A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp, and the world seems so fresh. It’s as though it had all just come into existence. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.
—Tom Ford’s film adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man
BLUM and Nassima Landau Art Foundation are pleased to present London-based artist Christopher Hartmann’s first solo exhibition in Paris.
Christopher Hartmann’s recent paintings examine the notion of reflection as a duplicate, a shadow, or, at times, only a hint of someone or something. Hartmann’s series of unmade, vacated beds allude to the bodies that once laid in them; his seascapes include distorted portraits of a man bathing, his face hidden from the viewer. This interest in what is not the thing itself but its remnants, in what is left behind and is doomed to fade and disappear, unleashes a set of emotions and themes that have long been present in Hartmann’s work—longing, closeness, despair, and desire as well as conflicting moods of intimacy and isolation. During recent travels in Florence, Italy, Hartmann was inspired by the chiaroscuro techniques employed by Italian Renaissance artists. As such, his newest works use darker tones that offer a heightened emotional intensity.
Conceived for and staged within the striking Haussmannian architecture of a home constructed in 1880, the works on view in this exhibition seem to be removed from any particular time or place, opting to explore subtle narratives that link the figurative and the abstract, as well as the personal and the universal. The bed paintings can be read as metaphors for the vulnerability of sleep, the uncertainties of dream states, and the attachment of physical relationships. A bed recalls the most intimate human moments, from sleep to sex, illness to death. It is a territory of emotional contacts between people, where feelings of attachment, love, and excitement coexist alongside sadness, dissociation, and pain. As an arena of conflict with a present or an absent body, the bed tends to be an elusive biographical record of loneliness. Creased sheets, impressions in the mattresses, and tangled mounds of clothing left on bed covers evoke the absence of the body. Hartmann focuses on these piles of clothing in a related series of small still lives.
The artist’s bed paintings are displayed alongside portraits of a young man emerging from the sea, the reflection of his face distorted in the rippling surface of the water. This and other seascape paintings exhibited here are analogous to the series of beds in the play between abstraction and figuration. The sea is a surface of waves and lights, but it is also the deep, which is hidden, unknown, and invisible. The ripples echo the folds in the bedsheets, suggesting different states of consciousness, unconsciousness, immersion, and flotation.
The dualistic theme of visual and introspective reflection continues in a portrait of the same young man sitting on the edge of a bed, his back turned to the viewer but his face visible in a mirror. Through this painting and others that depict this figure in states hovering between relaxed contemplation and withdrawn melancholy, Hartmann further explores ambiguous moods of closeness and solitude. The artist also considers his paintings of beds to be symbols of home. Presented in the ornate interiors of this former household, these works convey subtle narratives of presence alongside absence, past against present, and lived experience versus memory within a space that was once inhabited.
Christopher Hartmann (b. 1993, Germany) is a German-Costa Rican artist living and working in London. He holds an MA in Communication Design from Central Saint Martins, London, UK, and completed his MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, in 2021. He is a recent grantee from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation (2020) and resident of The Fores Project, London, UK (2020) and Nassima Landau Foundation, Tel Aviv, Israel (2022). Solo exhibitions of Hartmann’s work include Nightswimming, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, US (2023); State of Life, May I Live, May I Love, T&Y Projects, Tokyo, Japan (2022) and What I Want to Say Is This, Nassima Landau Foundation, Tel Aviv, Israel (2021). Selected group exhibitions include Gen. Gender. Genderless, Nassima Landau Foundation, Tel Aviv, Israel (2024); Queering the Narrative, Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, Germany (2022); MFA Fine Art Degree Show, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK (2021); High Voltage, Nassima Landau, Tel Aviv, Israel (2020); and London Grads Now, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK (2020).