Paul Hartigan loves language in all its forms and it is an ongoing preoccupation in his art, as graphic marks, symbols, game (Crossword, 1973), image/text and philosophical subject. In his latest series, Metaphors (2025), he uses the title to suggest how the viewer should approach the work, pairing it with a painting by Colin McCahon. A metaphor does not liken one item with another, that is the function of a simile; a metaphor makes symbolic associations, sometimes bridging dissimilarity, to transform meaning.
McCahon taught Hartigan at Elam, a figure to both admire and rebel against, a progenitor. At the time, Hartigan was not interested in McCahon’s painting technique or biblical references, but nevertheless he absorbed much from the older artist’s work and this influence emerges, transformed, in paintings such as…
