You're looking at one of Adreine Heart's black paintings, but actually there is no black on this painting. What may first appear as an all over black square actually is a grid, a 3x3 grid of, well, 9 squares, and each square contains an intensely deep shade of either red, green, or blue. One could call these chromatic blacks or colored blacks, because at the four corners of the painting we see actually a deep shade of red. Across the center of the painting we see a very deep green, in midway along the top and bottom edges we find a very deep blue. Now if you don't see this at first, there's a reason for it. Because even in front of the painting in the gallery, perceiving this painting is a function of the rods and cones adjusting in your eye. It's actually the same experience you have when waking up in the middle of the night, when at first everything is black. And then gradually as your rods and cones adjust, color forms slowly, gradually emerge. Perceiving this composition takes time, it takes patience, and it takes attention. And Ad Ryan Hart was actually very, very interested in exactly those qualities, for he sought to purify art and the experience of it. Ryan Hart wanted to keep art and business totally separate, eurelished the facts that these paintings are almost impossible to reproduce in photography. Ryan Hart was in the abstract expressionist circle. However, the paint qualities that you associate with that movement are totally lacking in Ryan Hart, and there's a reason for that. And Hart was an oppositional figure. If he knew that he were lumped in with the abstract expressionists, he would cringe at the thought. Ad Ryan Hart's painting process was a very individualistic one, a very unique one, and he never made a mystery of his technique like so many other New York school painters did. The first step in preparing this exquisite matte quality paint is actually involving these jars here, but interestingly, his materials, despite the fact that his paintings look so odd and unique, his materials are straight up classical, nothing more than oil paint out of the tube and turpentine, the typical solvent for all oil painting. So what he would typically do is to use quite a bit of Mars black paint. To that entire quantity, he would add just a little bit of one of the three colors he painted with red, green, and blue. Next day, generous douse of turpentine, and what I'm doing now is making sure that that oil paint is dissolving into that turpentine very, very thoroughly. Ryan Hart would then leave these jars on his shelves in his studio for a week, for two weeks, for perhaps a month. And the reason for that waiting period is that the dense part of the paint, in other words, the pigment, would settle to the bottom. Meanwhile, the light part of that mixture would rise to the top. What is the light part? Well, it's the turpentine that he just added. And now, the oil, the binder from that tube of paint, now extracted from that pigment, lifted up to the top of this jar, and what he would do next is this. He would open the jar, and then pour off all of that solvent phase, if you will, or all that light part of the paint mixture, leaving behind only that sludge of paint. Because Ryan Hart is withdrawn so much medium from his paint, the resulting paint surfaces are almost free of any trace of brushwork. In addition, they are the most matte paint surfaces you will probably ever see. Because there's no gloss, because there's no reflection on that surface, there's no other light hitting us in the eye. In other words, we have the opportunity to perceive color directly. Ryan Hart was by far and away the most subtle colorist of the abstract expression as painters. His use of color was so subtle in fact that it's on the very threshold of perception. To see these paintings, we quite literally have to slow down the pace of everyday life. These paintings demand our patience and close looking.