Gabriel Hartley’s recent painting show "Mosslight" at Hagiwara Projects (August 26–September 23) ended with Gabriel, painter Reina Sugihara, and I asking the question: what does it mean to paint. We’ve all called London home at some point. While Gabriel and Reina now have studios in different parts of Tokyo, thoughts of British weather and London sky remain vivid albeit different; doom-laden, hopeful, transformed. Gabriel’s paintings offer a different way of looking at or peeking through the iconography of each city at the end of a summer best described as impossibly hot. The following is an edited version of that conversation looking back at Gabriel’s work including his painted polaroids offering a glimpse of his studio, as seen above behind pigment, and the paintings it produced.

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