Bonsai Garden

by Anna-Cathérine Koch

A warm welcome to the exhibition “Philipp Haager – Bonsai Garden” at the artplosiv gallery in Freiburg, the fifth exhibition project we are doing together. On this beautiful – and dramatic – summer day, in the wonderful ambience of the Vogtei Rheintal in St. Gallen, the former bailiwick, and the enchanting gardens of the Guderian family.

“Gardens are places where things grow. Gazing at a garden, the eye wanders freely from the treetops down to the ground. Observing a garden means taking in the entire space. The best gardens are boundless – they have no edges – or there are bushes and trees that blur their margins. Behind them, we can imagine the garden sprawling without limit. The smaller the garden, the more it has to replace the landscape in an exemplary manner.” These words were written by Eva-Maria Schön in an article entitled “Inner Gardens” for the magazine Kunstforum International.

According to this description, even a small garden must hint at the complexity of the bigger picture. Just like a bonsai, known as penjing in China, recreates a landscape in miniature, a whole landscape within a small planter. Penjing is the art of representing harmony between the elements of nature (stone, with fine gravel symbolising water / landscape thus conceived as mountain and water), living nature (represented by the tree), and the human being (in the form of his work, the planter).

In its glorified ideal form, the garden has always stood for the lost unity of man and nature – an image of longing. Perhaps it is the Garden of Paradise we yearn for – and yet man must work to, as the artist Claude Monet once remarked, “reclaim his vanished paradise”.[1]

Like any good garden, Philipp Haager’s large-format paintings from the series “Nahfeld” (Nearfield), “Haager Deep Field” and “Nebula” are boundless. Here, too, it is the blurriness of his abstract colour spaces that gives our eyes something to hold onto for just a brief moment before our gaze then tries to penetrate his pictorial spaces layer by layer. He creates his works by letting ink glazes soak the canvas. The canvas is thus treated here like a membrane that absorbs the applied ink layers to different degrees of penetration. Haager therefore does not paint his pictures onto the canvas, but into it: the layers of colour spread out, they interpenetrate, they overlap, they glow.

The magnetic pull of Haager’s pictures can be attributed not least to their huge dimensions. The American painter Barnett Newman, together with Mark Rothko one the main exponents of American colour field painting, wanted viewers to come up very close to his sprawling colour fields, until their field of vision was completely filled so that they could lose themselves in the colour. In the art of Philipp Haager, we lose ourselves in colour spaces that are created not by pure colour planes but by the superimposition of different layers of colour, which in turn create amplifications or dissolutions, opacity or transparency. The colour black, for example, when gazed at long enough, is no longer perceived as black but as a complex event made up of varying hues. Haager’s paintings suggest the most diverse associations – his ink-permeated canvases evoke the idea of landscape, reminding us of impressions that we associate with experiencing nature. His abstract colour spaces remind us in turn of cloud formations or wafts of mist. We try to discern the horizon behind them, to catch a glimpse of a landscape shimmering through, and let ourselves be drawn in further and further, layer by layer.

The relationship between light and dark, these two elementary conditions of our being, tempts us to invest the images with mystical meaning, hinting at the religious origins of painted pictures. We might also think of Caspar David Friedrich and his sea of fog, of the sublime in nature, its grand and salutary qualities, which inspire a feeling of abject humility, or of “the attempt by Romanticism to symbolise transcendence through spatial metaphors.”[2] But perhaps the great English Romantic painter William Turner also comes to mind, his sunsets or his paintings of the fire in the London Parliament building. Or we are reminded of the water lilies painted by the Impressionist Claude Monet, recognising in the cloudy green passages the reflection of the surrounding landscape in the water lily pond.

There is something fleeting, spontaneous in the small-format paintings in the artist’s most recent series, the so-called “Bonsais”. As the artist himself notes, these may be viewed as germs, as seedlings for larger pictures. They are already imbued with all the complexity and density of the large paintings. These pictures are representatives in miniature.

Their size may vary, but the essence of the image content, which is fed by the core questions of painting, remains evident.

Noticeable here is how these small pictures display further spectrums of colour; they are more colourful, more playful – because here ink is joined by watercolours. The “bonsais” appear to us more like “erratic boulders”, spontaneous situations elicited from reality (as in plein air painting). The work illustrated on the invitation to the exhibition bears the meaningful name Yamadori – a term that refers to a tree shaped by nature, one that has become stunted due to lack of nutrients, for example, and can serve as raw material for a bonsai.

“Bonsai Garden” is not the result of actual gardening activity but rather of a process involving the metaphorical handling of the medium of painting. But in this exhibition the artist also invites us – as in a garden – to discover his paintings with our wandering gaze, from large to small, from small to large. The exhibition is an event – like the theatrical gardens of the Baroque and Rococo eras in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with their orchestration of natural and artificial worlds.

The hanging likewise follows a dramaturgy – Haager’s paintings open the space to us, let us immerse ourselves and then step back again, giving us excerpts, small glimpses and then in turn sweeping and imposing vistas. Just like in a garden, our gaze wanders from the bud upwards to the sky glimpsed through the canopy of leaves and then back again. In the large scale we discover the small, and in the small the large – closeness and distance alternate.

In 2014 we mounted an exhibition of works by Philipp Haager in Ebringen that took us on a journey outside our earthly perception. A series of “miniatures” brought to mind images produced by the high-performance telescopes with which we are trying to decode distant planetary nebulae and penetrate into alien galaxies. Work titles like Nebula and Deep Field also allude to this context.

Finally, a light object in the 2014 exhibition gave us a vision of the universe, unimaginable in its vastness but experienced here as a comprehensive and unifying whole.

In this exhibition, “Bonsai Garden”, we come back down to earth, back to the garden. But here as well, in this space which may seem boundless but is ultimately defined by its borders, we are left with the following realisation, probably the greatest insight in the history of mankind: “Everything is connected.”

“Establishing harmony and balance” is not only the key to “success” – to “happiness” – in the teachings of the bonsai. It is in fact humankind’s greatest challenge AND arguably our most important task for the future of our world.

And yet our longing for the Garden of Paradise is also simply something glorious, a dream of summer, of a congenial spot far removed from the world. So I wish you above all great joy in discovering this exhibition, and cordially invite you to pay a visit afterwards to the gardens of the former bailiwick of St. Gallen – orchestrated by the Guderian family – where there is also a great deal to discover.

Thank you.

on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Philipp Haager - Bonsai Garden’, July 2019