Manhattan Exhibition Portrays a Natural World Tinged With Mystical Portent

“Nature,” wrote the 19th-century American essayist and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret.” This quote comes near the beginning of Emerson’s 1849 series of meditations titled “Nature.” Like its author, the text is profoundly quixotic. Positing the natural world as an engine for a “radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts,” Emerson exemplifies an indelible strain of the American temperament — that is to say, a sturdiness of purpose prone to otherworldly fancies. Peg this as an individualist viewpoint, if you like, or, more plainly, eccentricity.Karl Hartman, whose paintings are the subject of an exhibition at Garvey/Simon, “The Nature of Nature,” aligns his artistic goals to Emerson’s “radical correspondence.” He’s not alone in that pursuit. Mr. Hartman is part of an American lineage that includes painters like George Inness, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Arthur Dove and Charles Burchfield — that is to say, tight-lipped iconoclasts whose connection with the land is tinged with mystical portent.Mr. Hartman’s pictures have been seen in museum and gallery exhibitions over the last several decades, but “The Nature of Nature” is his first solo exhibition in a commercial gallery in Manhattan. The majority of paintings are recent in vintage, dating from the last five years or so, with some outliers going back to the first decade of the century. The works are modest in scale — “Fourth of July” is the largest, measuring close to 3 feet square — and diligent in approach. Mr. Hartman asks a lot from himself as a painter.The artist makes his home in New Jersey, but originally hails from fly-over territory — Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma to be precise. His aesthetic viewpoint is indicative of formative years spent in open-ended spaces. With the exception of a child partially seen holding the title creature in “Horny Toad” (2023) or the accordion-like contraption that is “Bee Smoker” (2019), the compositions are absent of overt human activity. Even the suburban houses seen in “Early Morning Sun” (2022) are less actual homes than Platonic ideals.Karl Hartman’s “Gust Front”(2018) oil on wood panel 22 x 22. Via Garvey SimonThere is in Mr. Hartman’s art a sense of time being held in the cusp of a hand. Movement in these dioramas — whether it be the rolling of storm clouds or the eddy of a river — has been clarified and made oddly concrete. The results border on the Surrealistic, but they also contain a quirky current of comedy. The avians pictured in “Black Birds in Leaves” (2024) are up to no good: Conspirators rarely are. The black cow at the bottom right hand corner of “Gust Front” (2018)? Its attitude toward the events at hand would have been the envy of Seneca. Stoic, that is to say, and then some.The light coursing through the pictures is crystalline, and Mr. Hartman’s hand is patient and true: There isn’t a centimeter of the paintings that hasn’t been attended to. Through the careful layering of oil paints, he achieves a rare luminosity of color, and a fetching tangibility of shape, texture and contour. The vantage points of the imagery simultaneously emphasize far-flown distances and phenomena close at hand. A forest floor strewn with acorns, blossoms and sticks is as much a macro-cosmos as the otherworldly presence that is “Sun Halo” (2025). The life of American art is more varied and vital than our cultural gate-keepers would often make us believe. “Karl Hartman: The Nature of Nature” is a must-see exhibition and much overdue.

Manhattan Exhibition Portrays a Natural World Tinged With Mystical Portent

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