Andrew Pierre Hart: The Listening Sweet

“Curve your circles counterclockwise
Use your cipher to decipher, Coded Language, man-made laws.”

In 2017, Hart set out his theory of ‘Sonic Ordering’ exploring sensory overlap and enhancement where all things that exist come into play to create what Hart calls ‘sonorous rhythm’. He explained, "Sonic ordering is constantly active, converting, equating, equalling spaces, all visual and aural mediums.” In short, the theory articulates the presence of a third space – striving to view the quotidian marvels of a rich, overlooked world at both the itemised and conjoined intersection of visual experience and aural stimulation: “It is the continual rhythm whilst riding a bike with the cross rhythms of cars passing by; the dripping tap in relation to the blue fairy lights at the bottom of the garden, each light rhythmically spaced, the run of streetlights that are the constant high hat in 4/4 house beat; the door in relation to the wall in relation to the window in relation to the tunnel perspective created by the architecture of the street; the sound of the turn at the end of the street; the accentuation and nuances of birds flying by,” said Hart. 

“We are determining the future at this very moment.
We now know that the heart is the philosophers' stone Our music is our alchemy”

As this theory comes into play in The Listening Sweet, the exhibition operates as both cross-modal experiment and a gesamtkunstwerk revealing layered narratives of experiment, instruction and sonic and aural utopias. On a fundamental level, Hart investigates and reveals how the observation of painting might be enhanced by sound and how sound (particularly the registers of 2020 and 2021) might be understood through painting especially through abstract and figurative strategies. Across several paintings in the show, a number of mysterious, contemporary-seeming figures appear, all deemed by Hart to be characters: fictive deities, magicians and healers. Linked to esoterica, they embody the formalities and dialogues of painting including representation and ideas relating to sound including but not limited to acoustic levitation, spatialization, the human as a vessel of sound and the creation of physical and theoretical space. Meanwhile, a sound installation comprising found-sound, ad-libs, jazz-standards, DJ skills, recording processes, remix techniques – key sound signatures of Hart’s practice, threads sonic activity – quite literally between paintings. 

‘We enlist every instrument: Acoustic, electronic.’

Influenced by the writings of Fred Moten, Alvin Toffler, Saul Williams and the plasticity and dexterity of rap, poetry and spoken word, Hart’s work effects a flexion and torsion of the language – of sound, of painting, of space.  Using an artistic process akin to the bricolage-like character of ‘DJ technologies’, Hart builds on his interest in sonification, ambiance and atmospherics and presents a sonic argument for the poetics of cross-modality and ultimately the potential for newness. [1]

‘Every person as beings of sound to acknowledge their responsibility to uplift the consciousness of the entire fucking world.’

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[1]  carrying forward analogue modes of existence into digital futures.

About The Artist

Andrew Pierre Hart lives and works in London. Deeply influenced by music, Hart’s work is a renegotiation of the visual legacies of Western abstraction and figuration, probing connections between the phenomena, language and representation of sound in painting

He holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (2019) and BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts (2017).

He is a recipient of the ArtAngel Thinking Time' Award (2020) and Tiffany & Co. x Outset Studiomakers Prize (2019). Recent exhibitions include Collective Intimacies at Theaster Gates' Black Image Corporation, 180 The Strand, London (2019); Royal College of Art Graduate Show (2019).