By any measure, Simon Hargrove is not an artist easily contained by medium, market, or even myth. His practice exists in the strange overlap between performance and artefact, intimacy and commerce. For the past five years, Hargrove has written letters. Handwritten, ink-stained, occasionally water-damaged, sometimes months late. And yet, these missives, which can take the form of love confessions, furious accusations, inventories of cloud formations observed from his window, or what he once called “portraits in syntax,” have come to command extraordinary prices. The collectors,who are not so much collectors as recipients,pay for the right to receive a letter from this artist. To wait, as one Wolverhampton gallerist put it, “for the postal sublime.”
Hargrove calls this practice Correspondentialism, a term he first used in a 2021 lecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. “The letter,” he declared then, “is the last object that still arrives with breath on it. It is a body folded into paper, a psyche sealed with, excuse the vulgarity, spit.” The audience, fatigued by digital immediacy and the dematerialization of art objects, erupted into something halfway between laughter and reverence.
His story borders on the implausible. Born in Oxford, he allegedly spent his early twenties working in a monastery archive in Avignon, tasked with cataloguing correspondence between medieval abbots and their distant patrons. There are rumours that he once locked himself inside the archive for forty days, reading nothing but farewell letters written by monks on their deathbeds. When asked about this, he only shrugged: “It was not art. It was apprenticeship.”
What makes Hargrove’s project so disarming is its refusal of immediacy. Buyers,who pay anywhere between €4,000 and an eye-watering €120,000 per letter,do not know when their missive will arrive, nor its content. A single collector in Berlin reportedly waited seventeen months for an envelope, only to receive a page describing in exhaustive detail the sound of dripping water in a hotel corridor. Another, in São Paulo, received nothing but a pressed leaf accompanied by an unsigned sentence: “You did not wait for me; you waited with me.”
Another, received by a patron in Vienna after nearly two years of silence, was written in blue ink across both sides of a page torn from a French phone directory:
“I counted the hours until you opened this. That counting is the artwork. You hold only the receipt of my waiting.”
Is this merely fetishism of delay, of scarcity in the Amazon age? Or is Hargrove, with unsettling precision, re-instituting the very conditions of longing that modern communication has annihilated? Critic Marianne Klotz, writing in Texte zur Kunst, has argued that “Hargrove re-sutures art to eros, not by depiction but by anticipation. His correspondences are not artworks; they are absences curated.”
In person, Hargrove is elusive. He does not give interviews, though he is known to walk into openings dressed as a postal clerk, stamping guests’ hands with the word WAIT. The few who know him personally describe him as “archival,” as though he were already a document.
Whether Correspondentialism proves to be a durable form, or merely another flare in the ongoing crisis of art’s ontology, remains unclear. What is certain is that Hargrove has managed something almost impossible in a time of instant delivery: he has turned delay into ecstasy, and waiting into wealth.
As one recipient whispered at a recent salon in Vienna, holding an envelope they hardly dared to open:
“The letter itself is irrelevant. It is the arrival of a presence you paid to anticipate. It is brilliant. He has weaponized longing.”
And in that weaponization, Simon Hargrove has written himself into art history,one envelope at a time.