HYPERVIGILANCE: HANNAH DE CORTE

Combining a conceptual and expressive approach to painting, Hannah De Corte engages with the pictorial surface on its own terms, exploring its inherent parameters. She works with canvas as her iconological partner, treating the support of a painting as her medium. Working at once with and against the material, she engages, explores and pushes its properties into abstraction and metaphor.

In Hypervigilance, the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, many pieces are exposed in the reverse — the vulnerable underside of the canvas is presented as the work. At times, De Corte even removes the stretchers from her paintings, which maintain their shape by the semi-solidity the paint brings to the (hidden) face of the canvas. Using many layers, the acrylic bleeds through the fabric, creating graphic abstractions, almost reminiscent of a rorschach test. Colorful threads replace the staples that once held the wooden frames in place. Some are the loose threads from the painting itself, others she gathers and incorporates from alternate works. These delicate, brightly colored strings close the edges of the canvas around the now-absent stretcher. The works are supple and soft, holding lightly in their form the imprinted memory of the rigid rectangle of the stretcher. The edges have come loose.

Emotionally, hypervigilance is a survival state of constant alertness. The nervous system is taught and fraught, constantly scanning and ready to react. It is as if the boundary between the self and the outside world has been ruptured, and like these bleeding canvases, the self is hyperpermeable: receptive to the point of fraying. Hyperfocused, each detail is heightened and charged.

Building on her earlier work engaging the knots of the cloth as individual surfaces for pointillistic expressions of color, De Corte works here with the primary colors cyan, magenta, yellow, and black in a reference to the hues used to translate digital screen images into physical prints. Here she is exploring the art historical links between highly individual pointillist and impressionist brush strokes and our contemporary visual vernacular.

De Corte is currently exhibiting in the major group survey show Painting After Painting - La Peinture Contemporaine en Belgique at S.M.A.K. in Gent open through 2 November, 2025.  She is the recipient of a Getty Scholars Grant from the Getty Research Institute where in 2026, she will conduct a research project into the detrimental effects of conservation techniques titled Tortured Pictures: Re-Reading Cubist Paintings in Light of Excessive Early Treatments.