ANTWERP.- Left alone to command a gallery, Christopher Hartmann’s exacting oil on canvas paintings not only demonstrate his ability to render and imbue, but also make aesthetic demands on his viewers. Whether ostensibly seascapes, empty bed-scapes, or erotic everyday domestic scenes, one of the overarching subjects of Hartmann’s paintings has to do with perception – our capacity to register nuance, and shifts in tone and atmosphere. In his exhibitions, we are invited to complete the triangle in a virtual constellation with an absent artist and his work. A single quality runs through his most recent paintings – a yearning that can be sensed in the artist’s loving rendering of skin and fabric, and in the peaks and troughs of ocean waves.

There is nothing superficial about Hartmann’s soft, engrossing tonal surfaces; they are empathic mirrors. This is the high art of mimicry. But not in the sense of the ironic closeups of mid-20th century photorealism, or as an arched reaction to the ‘slop’ of contemporary algorithmic image generation and social media consumption.

Instead, Hartmann’s work entails an age-old aesthetic inquiry. The eerie perfectionism of his paintings leaves viewers conscious of the gap between the image and reality, between the experience of the places and people that matter to us, and our imperfect memory or record of them. This goes to the heart of the reasons why art must exist. In an engrossing paradox, it is the time-consuming exactitude of Hartmann’s work which makes this shortfall, this unattainability so palpable.

In a pair of works featuring king-size unmade beds, the artist’s staged lighting creates tinted penumbra and umbra across the picture plane. For these the artist was inspired equally by visits to Antwerp’s old master museums as sunrise and sunset photographed from his guest accommodation’s terrace. The compositions’ filmic artificiality points to the abstraction of the motif, as does a conscious slippage back and forth between verticality and horizontality.

For the bed works, the artist has immersed himself in every crease and fold. And so, depending on a viewer’s own interests, art history may come flooding in. The fabric, and the absent body, for instance, activate far-reaching cultural resonances across Western art history. Meanwhile, the eye metaphorically drowns in overwhelming detail. It is this conscious awareness of pleasure, beauty, and inherent loss that gives these compositions their pulse.

Despite the sense of saturation and richness, the viewer would be correct in surmising that the artist is also withholding information about himself in order to make ambivalent room for his paintings to be art. What does it change anything to know that the seascapes were photographed off the coast of Costa Rica, where the artist’s mother was born? Or who might have slept in what beds, or who exactly doesn’t live here anymore? Our personal narratives, desires, intimacies, losses can be shared in art. Apparently, we each make our own beds.

You Don’t Live Here Anymore (2026) is the painter’s second solo exhibition with Gnyp Gallery and his first in Belgium.

Text by Dominic Eichler, Berlin 2026