Paintings Without Image
by John Zarobell
If abstract art—emerging in the first decade of the twentieth century—broke away from the idea that painting has to represent what we see like a window on the world, by the second half of the twentieth century artists had divested themselves of the idea that painting has to produce any recognizable image at all. The paintings by Gwen Hardie currently on view at Dolby Chadwick Gallery and the works by Emil Lukas at Hosfelt Gallery start from this repudiation of image and explore how to take painting into new territory. While the works of Hardie explore color and light in a manner devoid of form and material trace, Lukas retains a physicality in his works, which are neither pictures nor always paintings. The presence of both of these exhibitions in San Francisco right now allows for careful study of the evolution of abstract images in the twenty-first century.
Left: Emil Lukas | Knockamixon Merge #2395, 2026 | Acrylic on canvas over wood panel | 48 x 48 x 2 3/4 inches
Right: Gwen Hardie | Caribbean Sea, 01.15.26, darkest indian red on turquoise, 2026 | Oil on canvas | 16 x 16 inches
When looking at a painting, or a series of them, by Hardie, one perceives color emanating from a square form as if one were looking at a block of colored glass illuminated and therefore glowing. The squares of pigment on canvas seem to hover on the wall as visual phenomena and there is no trace of their being made. I had to ask the gallery attendant if they were painted with a brush (they are) because there were literally no brushstrokes visible. It is almost as if the paint just settled there. The works are based on a transition between two colors, usually grey and another stronger color, such as violet, blue or green. The result is a sense of one color fading into another near the edges of the canvas but the effect is resolutely visual. No matter how close you get to the paintings, they do not disclose anything but color. Since they are made of oils, the colors are wonderfully rich and the transitions are nuanced with the most extreme subtlety. If one imagines that there is one color in the background and another in the foreground, that effect is really in your head or perhaps “in your eyes” is more accurate. Hardie plays with the way our optic nerve perceives, suspending its normal operations so that something else, something spectral in my view, can emerge.
Gwen Hardie | Caribbean Sea, 2026 | Oil on canvas | 16 x 128 inches
The point is not that Hardie is somehow calling up ghosts by not showing us anything. Rather, her work opens the door for viewers to encounter a visual experience that is not fixed on identification of the material world, which is how our vision is usually engaged. When paintings do not represent, what do they do? They provide another means to see. Hardie manages to suppress the question of what we see so that we can just look. This could be misconstrued as art for art’s sake, in other words a self-referential experience in which a painter traps a viewer in an endless loop. In fact, Hardie’s paintings are surprisingly liberating.
Gwen Hardie | Caribbean Sea, 2026 (detail) | Oil on canvas | 16 x 128 inches
The titles, at least of the multi-canvas works (Hardie calls these “Sequences”), are sometimes suggestive (Arc of the Sun, Caribbean Sea) so there is also some indication that there is more here than meets the eye. Caribbean Sea (2026) is a sequence of eight small canvases, each sixteen by sixteen inches, that range from dark blue to light blue suffused with grey. There is a tonal shift here that will make anyone who has ever been an art student recall Josef Albers and his endless Homage to the Square series, in which colors are juxtaposed to produce sometimes surprising optical effects. Albers was trained at the Bauhaus, where he became an instructor before moving to the United States and teaching at Yale. Color theory was an important part of the curriculum there and his paintings are perceived as experiments in color that provide, in an almost scientific sense, evidence for a more sophisticated understanding of its properties and characteristics. Hardie’s paintings echo Albers’ experiments but each component (square canvas) demonstrates a movement between two colors, so when they appear as a series, there is a double movement, a transition from one canvas to another just as there is a transition in each canvas.
Gwen Hardie | Arc of the Sun, Venetian Red, 2025 | Oil on canvas | 20 x 160 in
Arc of the Sun, Venetian Red (2025) also explores the development of color across eight canvases but these components are slightly larger, twenty by twenty inches. This double title tells us both the color that is being explored, as well as providing an ostensible subject that is being represented. But one cannot look at the arc of the sun; one perceives its arc only indirectly, over time. So, the first thing this title tells us is to slow down and not look for meaning directly. It emerges, as both an experience of light, and a memory of what the light was before, also implying that it will change in the future. Without time it is hard to grasp this work.
Digging deeper, exploring the colors as they transition from left to right, I felt that everything I knew about color was being questioned. The first point disproven here is that color takes form. Here it is resolutely formless, despite being on the surface of an actual canvas. Another expectation I held is that one color would either blend into another or form a contrast but it is hard to find the blending from red to grey because they seem to exist simultaneously on the surface. Further, the tonal intensity of the transition is not as expected. Spend some time looking at paint colors on strips in a hardware store, and you can guess what a color looks like if you mix in some grey to lighten it, but those rules don’t seem to hold here. The darkest square on the left is a strong violet, nearly brown, albeit with a lighter center. There is a big jump from there to the next square, red at the core with grey edges. The grey modulates the color experience, changing not just the tone, but the density of the optics. By the time you get to squares five and six, when pink jumps to blue, the red has given way to grey but grey now appears as blue. The series suggests an arc because the lightest tones are in the middle of the series. What we seem to witness is the portrait of a day’s light. What a viewer can discover is that light does not change in expected ways and colors do not capture light consistently. Colors are not matter in Hardie’s works, but ephemera–something spectral. The more you try to look for color, the less you see it.
Emil Lukas | chandelier hallucination #2385, 2026 | Thread, wood, paint, nails | 31 1/2 x 31 1/2 x 3 inches
Lukas’ work plays with color and light in a very different way. If you see his works in reproductions on a screen, there are major similarities. A work like chandelier hallucination #2385 (2026) looks very much like a painting of a white center on a blue ground but, in fact, it is a visual product of thousands of threads stretched across the surface of a rectangular frame that holds a white plaster cast beneath. The density of color which appears to be, like Hardie’s, modulated with the greatest subtlety, is in fact the result of the build-up of threads of many colors which read collectively as blue. Lukas is playing with color theory, to be sure, but his delivery turns out to be shockingly physical and very finely wrought. The labor of building the object is resolutely visible and the magic of discovery is not suspended in paint, but confirmed in matter.
Emil Lukas | canopy #2400, 2026 | Acrylic on canvas over wood panel | 66 x 96 x 2 inches
Hosfelt is showing two kinds of constructions in the current exhibition—one which the artist calls “Thread Work”, already described, and the others are “Bubble and Lattice Work”, which are both made in the same way. Once again, I had to ask the gallerist how these are constructed in order to understand them. Lukas starts with a painted canvas, of varying sizes, and then sets an aluminum grid made of small empty circles on top of the canvas, into which he inserts acrylic paint. So, a final work, like canopy #2400 (2026) might look like a nebula from outer space from a distance but upon closer inspection, small dots, approximately half an inch in diameter, cover the surface of the painting in various colors, some of which do not fit in well and so strike the viewer as distinct from a distance. They appear to sit on the surface until you get close and realize that the whole surface is covered with colored dots that sit on the surface. Lukas is not projecting ephemera here so much as optical effects. Comparing Lukas to Hardie is like comparing Op Art (Vasarely) to Color Field Painting (Rothko). Yet the art historical categories obscure what is happening in both of these shows. Hardie and Lukas are both experimenting with the optical experience of color but the absence or presence of materiality in their works provides very different off-ramps for the viewer. While the works of both artists reward slow looking and encourage careful apperception, the works of Hardie move beyond the eye and out of the body while Lukas’ works reveal the juxtaposition between optics and materiality, nevertheless upsetting our expectations. Both artists train us how to look so that we might truly see.