These atmospheric paintings of Richard Hearns impart intimations of nature in contest with the material reality of oil on canvas. In these considerably abstract landscapes, allusions to panoramic terrains and glimmers of luminosity are revealed through spartan configurations and painterly coloration.

Undulating between representation and abstraction, these aerial compositions halt definable perspective, unfolding perception’s temporality. The unrestrained brushstrokes and gesturally expressive marks at once generate and disrupt the illusion of space, embodying the phenomenological insights of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty on space, time, perspective and the subject’s perception of the world: “The thing and the world exist only in so far as they are experienced by me or by subjects like me, since they are both the concatenation of our perspectives, yet they transcend all perspectives because this chain is temporal and incomplete.”1

Suspended between the elemental structure of a landscape and nonrepresentational painting, these gestural explorations of Hearns prompt discursive exchanges with primarily representational works by such forerunners of modernism as J. M. W. Turner, James McNeill Whistler and Claude Monet, along with thoroughly abstracted works by such Abstract Expressionist and Color Field painters as Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Helen Frankenthaler.