Stephen Harwood 'Future Ghosts'

About

Stephen Harwood is a necessary witness. He haunts that which is most haunted. A covert pathology, a certain show of downriver blight, externalised. And made hard, vivid. He stays within the tradition of tradition: absent figures remembered and reforgotten by their missing outlines. Soliciting a point of vantage in our constantly degrading and renewing landscape. Future ghosts.

Iain Sinclair 2024

The city is a floating idea as much as a physical zone of bricks and mortar; the dreams and nightmares of its inhabitants loom in the air like traumatic rainclouds threatening to break. Stephen Harwood’s paintings seek to imbue urban London with some of this psychic tension, and so redefine what we see as mundane. The buildings in these paintings appear to glow from within whilst they are marked without with a confusion of gaudy sigils. Harwood’s work is concerned with a London that exists beyond the rhetoric of politicians and the calculations of financiers but which is scarred by their machinations. It is a London that shimmers with a makeshift intensity, and gestures towards a haphazard mythos. 

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times. The flows of capital produce an endless churn of redevelopment and regeneration with which we must reconcile ourselves if we are to live in a city. We thereby become conditioned into seeing these things as a natural part of our environment and this has the effect of dulling the senses to their presence. By revealing the hidden energies already encoded in the construction of these buildings, and by attending to the accumulation of graffiti and advertising, Harwood returns a sense of human (and spectral) agency to urban alienation. In these paintings, the vandals who tag walls are brought to the same level as advertising posters, each laying down their markers in the environment; like wild dogs pissing the extent of their territory. Indeed, even the sun burning orange through darkened clouds joins in the dance of colour.

Districts rise and fall; transience is all. Art sees ghosts, those of the future as well as the past. Stephen Harwood draws out these presences and invites us to see the world as a wholly living and vibrant, if flawed, thing. The act of painting grants the possibility of redemption and re-enchantment.

Cormac Pentecost  2024