Watching paint dry

Billy Leahy on Alexis Harding's site-specific exhibition, a display of dripping, crumbling works currently flowing onto the floor of the Rubicon galleryAlexis Harding: New Works. Rubicon Gallery,  10 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2 until 17 June

An ever-expanding pool of jet-black oil paint is imperceptibly creeping across the polished wooden floor of the Rubicon gallery on St Stephen's Green. Five metres away, red paint drips down the wall and forms another puddle – this time it is slightly more self-contained; but the clean-up is still unenviable.

Both wooden-floor destroying works are new pieces by 33 year old London artist Alexis Harding, who has returned for his third exhibition in eight years at the Dublin gallery; And a lot has changed since 2002's show Skins. This time around, Harding is taking more risks, letting his paintings off the lead; this is a far more confident and self-assured exhibition from an artist who has always oozed paint, but now oozes self-belief in equal measure.

Skins was a fantastic, quite low-key exhibition which showcased Harding's unique style and intellectual involvement in the very nature of formal, abstract art. This originality, underpinned by a clever, investigative core, led to Harding making off with the the prestigious John Moores Prize – previous winners include Peter Doig, David Hockney and Richard Hamilton – in September 2004.
Visually, Harding's works are highly process-based. The first stage is to set down a bottom layer of monochromatic colour on the MDF or canvas using oil paint. Harding then pours coloured gloss, which is incompatible with the oil paint, to form a second layer. He makes two passes over the monochrome base (one horizontal, the other vertical) to form his now signature grid pattern. The initial stage is now complete; the next takes a while longer – three weeks to over three months – and is the fundamental phase in determining how the final work will look.

Harding lifts the base from its flat surface, placing it at an angle or hanging it on a wall to dry, or as the artist says, “putting it to sleep”. The artist describes the process as a battle between him and the work with only around 30 per cent of the pieces making it to the completed stage.

Harding changes the slope and angle of the painting as it dries, meaning the outer gloss layer, which has by now formed a skin, “floats” on the oil paint below. He then manipulates the surface skin delicately with his hands until the gloopy bottom layer of paint oozes to freedom and the top gloss layer stabilises.

If the process is successful, the grid will end up disrupted, crumpled and at times almost totally collapsed. The underlying significance of this is that Harding has appropriated one of the great symbols of modernist abstraction before allowing a combination of the accidental and planned to morph and alter its form.

The large black work, ‘Halt', currently flowing onto the Rubicon floor, is an excellent piece of Harding art. The site-specific work was created as normal before being hung after just two days (and a day before the artist would have preferred), with the result that grid has almost completely slid off the aluminium surface, leaving just a small trace behind.

One has to imagine that if this were a studio piece, it would be among the 70 per cent that never saw the light of day – but it is fascinating to see his process at work and watch one of his pieces in transition. Harding (apart from the ill-judged work, ‘Chorus') is taking risks, and it is paying off in a big way.