Philipp Haager’s Dome Paintings

by Thomas Groetz

With the Dome Paintings, a pictorial form suddenly appeared in Philipp Haager’s work in 2019 that at first glance seems to come out of nowhere. It does relate to, albeit not derive from, the artist’s previous paintings, which feature gently modulated surfaces created through varying tonal values, or in other cases layers of paint gradually built up to seal the pictorial skin. But that sealing and locking in is precisely what is missing in the Dome Paintings, and it is replaced by its virtual opposite: the explosive parting of those layers. The painting method no longer aims at homogeneity and meticulously executed colour gradients, or nearly impenetrable layers, but manifests itself beyond any centred build-up of planes in the visible addition of individual elements.

The pictorial tension inherent in the Dome Paintings consists primarily in the contrast between directly applied accumulation and “evaporation” across the surface, between dense colours, selective agglomeration and a neutralising, bright flatness in the middle of each picture. “Revealing” his painterly means by showcasing his brushstrokes – and by extension his personal temperament – the artist places the alla-prima Dome Paintings in a clearer historical frame of reference than his earlier painting series permitted. Associations with the Abstract Expressionism of the war and post-war period as well as with the tradition of colour field painting from Mark Rothko to Gotthard Graubner play a role here. The emancipation and expressiveness of Pointillism may also come to mind, a microcosm of dots and flecks in contrasting colours that creates a completely different kind of flickering surface than the airy and by turns dense veils of darkness and lightening that characterise, for example, Haager’s Deep Field Nebula Paintings.

A further factor in the essential difference between the painting typologies is that the artist has dubbed his latest series Dome Paintings, thus suggesting a metaphorical reference to cultural history. While the description Deep Field Nebula Paintings seems to be more of a neutral, scientific term, the name Dome Paintings links these works to a topos, or even a concrete manifestation, that can be connected with Christian, but not only Christian, religious practice. The word “dome” in English calls to mind the cupola of a church, and the German word Dom means cathedral, so that this designation evokes a kind of crystallisation point for an assumed entity that transcends the human as category. For such manifestations of the divine, the erstwhile Christian Occident developed corresponding vessels, i.e. architectures, rendered in stone and on a scale far exceeding that of the human body.

The dome is a central element of this architecture, a vault spanning the crossing of church buildings with a cross-shaped floor plan. In and with the dome, a stereometric volume above the crossing gives the illusion of dissolving as it soars upward into an expanded, otherworldly form of existence. The pictorial architectures of the Dome Paintings seem to not only hint at but make palpable the alternative possibility of experience offered by such domes; the seeing eye is drawn into the centre of the picture by accumulations of colour that practically pile up at the edges of the rectangular picture surfaces to build an ethereal fabric of milky-white colour veils. The composition establishes an upright rhombus on the vertical or square canvases, the corners of which, however, are in most cases bevelled into ovals.

The resulting oval or almond shape has had a special meaning in the history of art since the Middle Ages as a mandorla, a separate space of existence and protection surrounding extraordinary figures such as Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary. Later, the oval form was particularly common in Baroque architecture – as an elliptical floor plan or a dome. The stretching of the balanced, tranquil form of the circle into an oval connotes activation and intensification on the one hand but also the blurring or synthesis of the “polarities” of square and circle on the other.

Haager’s Dome Paintings, which not only refer to the architectural form of the dome but can also be related to paintings adorning the insides of domes or on ceilings, resonate – in a subtle fashion – with the artist’s own cultural affinity to his southwest German homeland. (Baden-Württemberg has numerous Baroque churches, as do the neighbouring countries of Austria and Switzerland.) At the same time, the Dome Paintings give the impression of an artist who is taking off in new directions. Although these paintings may not necessarily call into question the optimised and in some cases hermetic surface formations of his earlier pictures, Haager is undertaking here a new and different mode of operation that seems to function more analytically than synthetically: the closed surface has become fragmented, so that the image – as if under the microscope – reveals what it is made of. Haager offers us a view of atoms or cell clusters, of the moving individual pieces and interdependent forces from which the whole of the world emerges. This world is not only the superficial reality of molecules, however, but perhaps an even more finely articulated, transcendent sphere whose existence and effects are revealed to us by art.