Richard Hearns: Autonomous yet Referential

Executed through a highly gestural syntax, Keystone of Richard Hearns captivates the viewer through a hazy luminosity induced by its electrifying tints and shades of blue smeared upon, lying beneath and skirting the white, black and grey brushstrokes. As the painting displays a set of interchanges between forms of abstraction and vaguely decipherable pictorial references, the materiality of oil paint evokes the opticality of bodies of water, land, mist and sky. Glowing and dim, dense and sparse, substantive and imperceptible, Keystone comes across as autonomous and referential at once.