Liberalism

EN/FR

Harlan Levey Projects
Rue Isidoor Teirlinck 65, 1080 Brussels
September 12 - October 24, 2026

« The conceit of modernist painting is one of a reliable surface » Miriam Stoney

Liberalism presents a series of 8 large square format paintings that explore the coincidence of the political ideology of Liberalism and contemporary painting.

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based in the beliefs of liberty, individual autonomy, progress, pluralism and privacy – it is global in scope. The project of ‘contemporary painting’ historically emerged in parallel to the development of Liberalism, initially in Europe in the 19th century, explicitly through American abstraction in the mid 20th century, then exponentially alongside free market globalism in the late 20th century.

Whilst the crisis in centrist politics is widely understood as a consequence of the contradictions engendered by Liberalism at a global scale, a crisis within contemporary painting is less exposed. For Liberalism to facilitate itself at a global scale it needs to abstract individuals into interchangeable units through a broad process of flattening out cultural differences. Contemporary art has followed a similar course through an expansive process of ‘abstraction’ that strives to encompass and integrate global artistic production into a cosmopolitan cycle of discourse.

Through the advent of social media and the principles of individualism that both conceived and drive it, painting has become a placeholder for the fantasies of self-expression, autonomy and authenticity that feed these affective flows. Painting has become content, and a lot of painting is content with itself as a demonstration of this kind of liberal individualism, whereas historically the medium functioned as a practical, secular exercise in reconfiguring one’s perspective – of learning how to look. Both of these understandings of painting are inherently liberal, and together they are suggestive of the kinds of dynamic contradictions embedded within the projects of liberalism and contemporary painting. Painting’s flow through other media has perhaps ironically led to a clear reflection of its own medium specificity, its subject par excellence, as Liberalism.

These paintings follow a formal procedure via a series of 2 x 2 meter canvases, approximate of the traditional scale of ‘Abstract painting’. The square permits a constant format when rotated, both physically and conceptually, as Liberal political party logos are painted across each of the 4 orientations of the canvases, proceeding from a strict protocol into impartial ‘free-hand’ improvisations. The choice of parties is simultaneously researched and arbitrary – an effort has been made to group parties from different global regions that share no direct political correlation, with each group spanning poisitions across the left-right political spectrum. Simultaneously, the groups are selected purely in terms of their visual coalescence – they must look good together. The paintings are rotated throughout their making, bringing the images into compression, negotiation and con-fusion. They are always hanging the right way up.

The generally understood problem of the square format amongst painters is that you find yourself composing around the center, you become creatively or compositionally constrained if you will. This crisis at ‘the center’ of both the paintings and contemporary liberal politics gives a charge to the decisions and events occurring throughout each painting - creative colours, blurred edges, ambiguous overlaps, entangled information and whited-out spaces become open visual analogies as the paintings perform their own liberal subjectivity. The conventional goal of the ‘resolved painting’ begins to feel ludicrous or at least unlikely, with the works seemingly stuck between a series of satirical exercises and sessions of earnest self analysis. The works invest themselves in an interrogation of ‘painting about painting’ and ‘politics about politics’ as cyclical and irresolute processes in relation to each other. This experiment is testing ways in which one allegedly exhausted form of mediation can reinvigorate the other, and how the coincidence of their shared crises and internal contradictions could create the basis for seeing each anew.

HLP Press release

Avec le soutien de la fédération wallonie bruxelles

Photos: Shivadas de Shrijver

︎︎︎ Click/swipe to rotate paintings ︎︎︎