In soot, dust and burning, Harold Ancart finds a fragile and fugitive elegance. Often working with found media – he sets photographs of tropical beaches aflame – motifs such as palm trees and parrots recur in his work, only to be offset by the delicate restraint of his works on paper. His is a practice concerned with removal and destruction, and the spaces between objects.

The present lot, a sharply graphic field executed in oilstick, captures the wistful quality of Ancart’s meditations. Flickering powerlines expand and contract across monolithic nightscape, illuminated by a vivid yellow disc of sun or moon; centrally aligned and recalling the pictorial elements of flag or company logo, it is lent a quiet momentum by its rising position on the rhythmic line. Small imperfections in the surface invoke a textural narrative of wear and dilapidation, placing the piece in an environment removed from its fictive exotic referent and underscoring a keenly realised physicality.

Untitled is an apparition of enigmatic beauty, hung between the finely-tuned aesthetics of Minimalism and an obliquely Expressionist impulse of damage and loss. A mysterious play of absence and presence hovers between the lines, emanating the scented air of nocturnal mirage; in its liminal space is a sense of yearning for elsewhere.