Densely Textured or Haptic Surface

About

Haptic means relating to touch, and these works appeal to it without being touched. Their surfaces are thick, ridged, piled or crowded, built from heaped paint or from hundreds of small units repeated across the whole field, so that the object hovers between picture and relief. The art historian Alois Riegl used 'haptic' around 1900 for art that the eye reads almost as a hand would.

Painters have long loaded the surface: the late Rembrandt van Rijn built up flesh in ridges of paint, and in the 1940s Jean Dubuffet mixed sand, tar and gravel into his canvases. Others accumulate objects. El Anatsui stitches thousands of flattened bottle tops into flexible metal hangings, Chakaia Booker slices and coils rubber tyres, and Chris Soal presses toothpicks and bottle caps into bristling, fur-like fields. Look at such work from the side, where its depth shows.