Nahfeld Bilder - Nearfield Paintings

by Anna-Cathérine Koch

Philipp Haager’s abstract paintings on canvas and paper have a direct and fascinating effect on the viewer. They are produced by letting India ink fully permeate the picture support – whether wet canvas or paper. This involves a time-consuming process of adding layer after layer, which only succeeds thanks to the artist’s experience gathered over many years with the specific qualities of canvas and paper and his care in applying the ink. Haager has developed an understanding over the years of what happens when wet colour meets wet surface – before the result becomes visible to the human eye. In his artistic work he treats the canvas or paper like membranes that absorb the applied layers of ink to different degrees. Haager does not paint his pictures onto the canvas but into it: the layers of ink spread, they interpenetrate, they overlap with each other, they glow. The different colour intensities let a play of colour nuances, structure and forms emerge before our eyes. This opens up a spectrum of associations and an interplay between them.

The temporal dimension also plays a role in how Haager’s work is perceived. The contemplation of his pictures is not exhausted in just a few moments. Rather, they demand that we “immerse ourselves”. We are compelled to explore what kind of visual memories the individual layers might evoke. His works suggest a depth beyond what can be identified, for there seems to be space behind them. Haager’s choice of a large format contributes to this impression, the dimensions themselves granting us permission to step into the pictures. While Barnett Newman decided where to best position observers to completely fill their field of vision (full field), thus enabling immersion in his monochromatic pictures, the pull of Philipp Haager’s pictures comes in part from their sheer size.

Some of Haager’s works are titled “Nearfield Phase”. The nearfield is the area around a sound source, which is characterised by more complex layers of electromagnetic waves and wave systems than the far field. His pictures can be considered nearfield due in part to the complex multi-layering of colour tones. These layers create amplifications or dissolutions, opacity or transparency. After long observation, black is no longer perceived as black but as a complex mix of other colours. The titles of Haager’s earlier works should accordingly be considered onomatopoeic. Each of his paintings expresses an individual, unmistakeable dialogue between the different tones and thus each has its own distinctive colour character.

We can also understand nearfield to refer to the space between the picture and the observer. In our eyes Haager’s works pulsate with the constant interchange between the identification, the rejection and finally the reordering of our visual memories. This initiates a process that takes the meaning of the painted picture itself as its starting point. The 16:9 format of these works brings to mind the cinema (and more recently television) and, not coincidentally, makes us think of the medium of film. Haager is fascinated by how truth is conveyed in the media and by the media’s Influence on our perception of pictures. He lets us encounter his pictures as an observer who undergoes a contemplative, aesthetic experience but at the same time is understood as an active participant in the painting.

A whole range of references to the history of art can be discerned in Haager’s work. Light and darkness tempt us to invest the images with a mystical air and hark back to the religious origins of painting. Their modulation reminds us of landscape paintings and “the attempt by Romanticism to symbolise transcendence through spatial metaphors”.[1]

Certain details thus recall Caspar David Friedrich’s figure seen from the back as he contemplates the sublimity of nature in an endless, ungraspable and otherworldly sea of mist. We are similarly reminded of William Turner’s plein air paintings on the cusp of classical modernism. And Haager awakens not least our visual memories – those gathered through personal experience and the images we share collectively and culturally through the media. This “immediacy of perception”[2] is the destination of his journey through the layers of art historical and personal connections. Layer after layer is revealed, letting us plunge ever deeper into his pictorial spaces. At the end, having arrived somewhere beyond the realm of the identifiable, we are left to our own devices and the picture becomes “the medium of our own self-assurance”.[3]

Given this effect, it seems only logical that Haager does not hold back from re-working his paintings, occasionally painting over them. Old layers are complemented with new, thereby adding new levels for us to ponder. We can sense here that the artist is “always seeking”. Thus his works are not necessarily complete, but the end point can instead become the starting point for a new artistic quest.

Light and darkness determine the composition of Haager’s pictures. His dramatic colour spaces unfurl between these two poles. Thus his recent light piece, to be unveiled at the artplosiv gallery’s forthcoming “Philipp Haager” exhibition, can be said to demonstrate the essence of his work. The object will be shown alongside a series of drawings by the artist, in a kind of chamber of wonders.

The starting point is a glass ball overlaid with black India ink. Gaps have been deliberately left, to show as points of light when the interior of the ball is illuminated. In a darkened room these points of light constantly form new constellations. The regular shape of the glass support structure, also painted black, dissolves, breaks down or bulges outward. As we shift our vantage point, the points of light rearrange themselves into an ever-changing and pulsating form. Through the layers of painted colour, only fully appreciated when the light inside the ball is turned off, and the deliberate gaps in the dark surface that let the light shine through, this piece allows Haager to expand his possibilities for artistic expression from two dimensions to three.

The piece makes us think about looking at our world from space, and how points of light identify human civilisation and urban agglomerations. Haager takes us on a journey outside our earthly experiences, reduced to the elementary conditions of “light and darkness”. Accompanying the object is a series of “miniatures” in which Haager expresses himself on paper instead of large canvasses. The artist’s handwriting is still clear, but he has developed here a separate and autonomous approach. The surfaces of the drawings show clear signs of oxidisation, with individual flecks of colour and the elements of which they are composed. Their composition makes us think of images from high-resolution telescopes, and our attempts to understand planetary nebula and distant galaxies. Through these works we experience the universe as an ungraspable yet binding whole, and also as an elemental condition of all existence.

on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Philipp Haager - Nahfeld Bilder’, May 2014

[1] Translated from “Philipp Haager PHASIS”, Helmut A. Müller, Hospitalhof Stuttgart (ed.), preface by Helmut A. Müller, p. 5, 2010.

[2] Translated from “Die Entfernung der Inhalte aus dem Bild. Zur Konstruktion des ‘unschuldigen Sehens’ im Abstrakten Expressionismus”, Anne Hoormann, p. 1.

[3] See note 2, Anne Hoormann, p. 2.

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