ARIEL HASSAN
b. 1977, Argentina
Lives and works between Germany and Australia
Ariel Hassan was born in Argentina in 1977. He has held solo exhibitions in Australia, Spain, Singapore and China. Group exhibitions include the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India (2012); Art Stage Singapore–project space (Greenaway Art Gallery), Singapore (2011); Australian Pavilion, Shanghai World Expo, China (2010); Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2008); Uneasy – Recent South Australian Art, Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia, Adelaide (2008)
A process of self-imposed rules with aleatoric outcomes constitutes the necessity of Hassan's work in painting, video or other mediums. Selections of raw images are studied, deconstructed and with little intervention patiently uncovered anew. A juxtaposition of simple equations and minimal transformations is staged, producing images of complex behaviour which advert to the gravitas and sovereignty of spaces unknown. Exploration without subjugation and the emancipation of the image itself, brings forward a dimension of ideological independence in conflict with identification, or even representation, consequently challenging authorship and opening the experience to multiple readings.
Hassan's ambiguous images articulate complexity and his own displacement by contrasting physical fluidity against the liquidity of conceptions that uncertainty incites. As such, the work is caught within a realm of existential paradoxes, where chaos is assimilated as an endless source from where to extract information and translate visual experiences. Communicating by confronting cognition and the acknowledgement of self within it, cultural elements precariously balance in the geology of images that consume them.
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART SKOPJE
On July 3, Ariel Hassan will present his exhibition “Tragedy of Equality” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje. The exhibition is curated by Melentie Pandilovski.
Born in Argentina, Hassan lived in Argentina, the USA, and Spain before settling in Australia in 2005, and later in Germany in 2008. Since then, he has divided his time between both countries.
His work, characterised by self-imposed rules and unpredictable outcomes, forms the basis for the emergence of complex visual narratives. He has held several solo exhibitions in Australia, Spain, Japan, Singapore, Austria, and China, and has participated in various group exhibitions, including the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and the Cairo Biennale. His work is represented in numerous public collections.
Although primarily a painter, his practice spans various media, existing at the intersection of painting, sculpture, performance, installation, and media art (video and VR), always coherently conceived and installed in relation to the architecture of the exhibition space.
ANTROPOFAGIA
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OF MERCY AND TIME
/ MELBOURNE ART FAIR, 2024
Ariel Hassan’s Of Mercy and Time (2023) collapses old gods and new technologies into one another. In the work, we encounter a religious figure, whose form is a hybridisation of the Buddhist deity Tārā and the ancient Roman god Saturn. In bringing together the two figures, Hassan—as the work’s title suggests—brings together an amalgam of their qualities: Tārā’s mercy and Saturn’s association with time. Yet one does not need to know these exact cultural references in order to register the figure’s divine antecedence. This is a work whose effect is borne as much out of feeling as it is out of intellect. Seemingly cast completely out of burnished gold, the imposing figure in Of Mercy and Time visually transports us to a theistic context without a single word needing to be uttered. The aural elements of the work that are present only amplify this sense of transportation, as Christian traditions are introduced into the work through the sound of Johann Sebastian Bach’s aria ‘Erbarme dich, mein Gott’ (“Have mercy, My God”). Hassan’s digitally rearranged soundscape emerges from his figure’s stomach, grounding the transcendence of Bach within the physical form.
Although one might expect to behold this central figure in a church, temple, or shrine, Of Mercy and Time exists in an entirely different setting: the space of virtual reality. Here, Hassan’s creativity is untrammelled. He is able to mould forms that are untethered from our terrestrial world. As he explains, there is no gravity or physical constraints in this place: “it’s the capacity of VR to do something that is completely immaterial or intangible.” But while the revolving otherworldly figure in Of Mercy and Time appears to transcend our reality, it also remains indelibly mired in it. On some level, the virtual-nature of the work seems to reflect our hyper-consumption of technology and the conditions of our logged-in, online, ever-streaming existence today.
When looking at the work, I find myself asking, whether it is a portrait of the new religion of the twenty first century, which sees so much of our lives contoured around our hand-held devices. The very form of the work harbours this provocation—as it adopts many of the tropes of religious transcendence, while at the same time withholding the ultimate practice of worship. Yet the work also cleaves a clear path away from the gamification of VR and its familiar deployment as entertainment. “The user is not entitled to operate the actions that are happening. There is no interactivity,” Hassan says. “You are putting yourself in a space that is intangible and is out of your jurisdiction.” Of Mercy and Time transacts in familiar technologies and recognisable symbolism, while ultimately moving beyond both.
Words by Tai Mitsuji
TRANSLATION / 2019
The uselessness of art redeems us humans, it is a space opposite, a counter-production that we need to keep interpreting and building, ideally in the most neutral way possible. Art is not about us, it is about all. Beyond any speculation I believe that the reason our world needs art is because we perceive a notion of complete equality and equanimity that exists only in the fundamental absolute power of art. We need art because it affects us, the experience damages us while simultaneously helping us regain trust in a condition that seems to avoid us. Our temporality, stubbornness, personal views, the excesses of added values; art doesn’t care for these, it attacks and erodes them, becoming relevant to us. Because the encounter with art humbles us, we must care for it.
Working on art projects stands not as an escape nor a crusade, but perhaps as a poetic lament and an attempt at translating into tangible that unfathomable space. From our fragmented reality, surviving all accidents of being, I keep striving to bring versions of this poetry into the world, translations that remain always imperfect and incomplete, but are done with as much fidelity as possible. This exhibition is one version of this, including works produced with broken, discarded and found materials; surviving traumatic transformations these are presented again heroic, as poetic figures in their regenerated structures, symbolic of the fluid nature of attested conceptions, or what is original.
AH
BEGINNING OF HEAVEN AND EARTH | TEXT -
The beginning of heaven and earth was separated by an invisible landscape on the horizon, strong, sharp and dangerous to cross, yet irresistible for those who dared. The border keeping the outsiders out or the insiders safe, the insiders trapped or the outsiders ignored. This was in my head as a child.
I remember a scene repeated on most common walls between neighboring houses back in Argentina in the 80s: over solid high brick walls, pieces of broken bottles and glass shards were cemented at the top. These would form a sort of mountainous horizon against the blue sky, a gruesome-poetic framing to the dwellings’ courtyards - the ‘decorative’ feature for the shared partitions. This topography of bourgeois fear would echo the high mountain ranges of the region where I grew up.
The expansion of the mountains, embracing salinas and deserts within the valleys that I would experience as an all consuming territory, was somehow condensed in these sharp and menacing shared walls. Contrary to the mountains’ expansion which confused frontiers, the walls aggressively protected and limited the private property of the families.
Whatever the social reality backing the erection of these violent separations, was not the focus of my attention and I would instead see them as metaphysical landscapes formed by translucent mountain ranges. They were attractive and seductive frontiers for explorers, more than inhibitors for the plausible animosity of intruders. The topology of these walls and of the walls in the minds of the neighbours, did not always manage to restrain trespassers.
The world today is still full of transparent or rigid borders, things to protect, reasons why to hinder free movement between peoples or ideas. Beyond the unreachable imaginal frontiers from childhood, I wonder if any real imposing borders from then or current ones (which provoke more than contain) don’t actually expose the intolerance and fear for the other, as opposed to effectively addressing the concerns for the integrity of what in the first place was intended to be kept safe.
The imaginary landscape has been re-enacted in stone and glass low enough for anyone to cross, just be careful not to get cut, but if it happens try to enjoy the accident.
AH
TRAGEDY OF EQUALITY
TOKYO + VOID / 2019
Direct contact battles between two contestants occur in triangular spaces. Physical triangulations reflect the opponent’s respective states of ‘desire’, ‘reality’ and ‘expectation’ within the binary law of domination and subjugation that maintains them, reflecting a global system of desire and fate continuously moving and consuming each-other.
As a primal tension structure, a triangulation indicates our existence as products of desire (mother-father-child), as natural bodies integrated in a social space of com-promise (political fate), to consume and satisfy production (economic fate), to deal with a contentious existence in an occupied space, subject to personal and external beliefs.
The competition strive for difference where difference is not allowed to occur. Competitors wear neutral white outfits and abstract “landscape” masks. Referencing classical Greek tragedy, the masks eliminate identity and transform the contenders into anonymous territories, each competing to conquer the opponent. The structure conforms to a territorial battleground where the actions, through infinite repetition, direct towards a sterilization of the external image, where cultural judgment is deprived of its absolute force.
What is desired is manifest: a struggle for difference or a violent acceptance of equality
Scenario
Armed with electric hair clippers, two contenders battled against each other. To neutralize individual status, contenders wore white overalls and a white abstract mask. Competitors battled to overpower each other, attacking and shaving the head of the other, able only to shave a small amount of hair before their roles were overturned, dominance and subjugation. Eventually, neither contender had any hair left to cut. Bald, they returned to their resting positions.
Outcome
Hair eliminated and not allowed to grow back. The body is controlled by force, restricting its capacity for difference. Denied its production, hair is hindered from protection or image production (individuality). Through cycles of domination and sub-mission, the action is inconclusive: no one wins, and individual signs are neutralized. Bodies are rendered non-productive, left in a perennial symbiotic tension.
MAKING ALL THINGS EQUAL / 2016
"The irremediable antagonism between desire and the excesses of permission seems to support those prophets like André Breton who, toward the end of his life, feared that by revealing and permitting all, we might end up depriving desire of its force.”
J-C. Guillebaud
Freedom, liberty, equality, power, desire, authority, oppression and submission ground Hassan’s new GAG exhibition. OIKONOMIA, a series of 30 works - the impetus of which started as a response to Goya’s Caprichos is formed from the defacement of photographic documentation of extreme sexual practices, absorbed in an abstract fluid system of painting to reveal unexpected images. Monstrous formations emerge as a result, out of the integral accident and our thirst for exposure and consumption - relationship occurring between total abstraction and rationality.
Showing concurrently, REVERSAL OF CONTINGENCY INTO NECESSITY is a large scale projection, a landscape devoid of human presence, a space outside our jurisdiction. The image is split in two perspective sections that fly away from each other, the structure acts as a proposition of opposite, possibilities of the same event – nihilism and morality, contingency and necessity. Separating the two planes are individual capital letters that systematically appear; if put together they form a passage from the Adjustment of Controversies by Zhuangzi.
CAPITULATION OF DISCOURSE / 2014
The chaotic and dynamic systems in Ariel Hassan’s work do not conform to notions of abstraction in the traditional sense, instead they are reproductions of events that we don’t often see, extracting abstract models through processes of imitation akin to neoclassicism. Representing nothing but themselves they suggest that to represent means to value, consequently excluding the other. His works open doors towards the mathematically elegant foundation of all.
Organic Occurrences Forming Within The Grey Zones Of Pre-existing Regimes advances Hassan’s research in translating events within silent structures. Here a collection of aleatory images of fluid paint have been circumscribed within the proportions of a Fibonacci rectangle, and later dissected by it and by an arrangement of Lemoine’s geometric construction of the golden ratio.
The geometric and organic sections come together to recompose the topology of an unknown territory, escaping definition; the sectioning affects the plasticity of the fixed image to form and deform further images within the complex maps and into our imagination. What we first see in these large photographs is only the surface of a much deeper ground, a virtual space where the point of view of the structure and that of the event, including the event of our viewing, converge. Thus the frame becomes a portal into the structure; into the environmental magic of the work, an access into a space of singularity far from discourse.
These images behave as open components of an ever changing event. They are open to ‘being’, but nothing in particular, as they are proportioned within structures that can articulate and survive every answer. What we see therefore are not pictures of the artist’s imaginary, but contact images, irrational events captured within transitory moments represented in our time with a degree of fidelity.
Included in this exhibition is Traces and Determinants, a three channel video installation running for 20 minutes. The work loops from light to dark, showing a swarm of lines that emerge and later dissolve; during their time they twist and connect, vibrating as a living organism that dances menacingly to the rhythm of techno sounds.
ABOUT MADNESS / 2011 - 2012
Immersed in a process that is both conceptual and material, Ariel Hassan has at the core of his work a simple procedure – a small quantity of different coloured paints are poured and allowed to run together on small panes of glass. In a vivid demonstration of the beauty of fluid mechanics, the different colours remain intact to a certain degree, and swirl around each other creating unpredictable patterns on both the macroscopic and microscopic level. Hassan later scans selected areas of these abstract images and manipulates the colour and composition in a computer. A print is produced which he painstakingly copies onto a large canvas with paint and brush. This hand-made painting is a crucial stage since it not only results in unexpected details and divergences from the print but also adds a human texture and an aura of authenticity, even mystery.
These paintings of Hassan are compelling images of flow, yet of a flow that did not literally take place on the surface of the canvas. Despite appearances, these works are representations of the images of flow. As well as their sheer beauty, it was this paradox that prompted me to write about them.
The suggestion that painting abstractions needs nothing more to say beyond the painting itself, not decided by title or explanation, is not a sentiment Hassan shares. Firstly he has titles; often obscure and elaborate. Moreover, his paintings are not content to rest on the wall; they can warp and twist into 3-dimensional space. In some instances, they literally sprout feet and step off the wall altogether to inhabit the viewer’s space – this is both macabre and humorous. They can morph into tessellated patterns on the floor that one walks on, or form wallpaper on some adjacent wall. The patterned floor can become a surface on which to place sculptures (modular, complex and intriguing in their own right); meteor-like objects can rain down from above in some installations and in others mirrored light boxes can appear on the walls. Thus, in Hassan’s exhibitions, the paintings themselves can become almost incidental to the total installation, yet painting itself remains at its core. I am reminded of the poet Novalis who once declared: “Every individual is the centre of a system of emanation”
Critical theory, research, and reading are important to Hassan. In a recent discussion he mentioned the writings of Deleuze and Guattari’s celebrated book ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, which pursues the philosophy of difference; the ‘nomad line of thought’, the ‘anti-hierarchical’. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ was one of the foundation stones for the emergence of post-modernism. While no longer an ‘issue’ or a ‘hot topic’ in the visual arts, I believe that its influence was profound, was widely absorbed and internalised, such that it underpins much of contemporary art practice today. Brian Massumi, the translator of ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ writes in his introduction that Deleuze and Guattari were keen to contrast their “nomadic thought” to the representational thinking characteristic of western metaphysics since Plato, which they refer to in a derogatory tone as “state philosophy”. He writes: “Nomad thought does not immerse itself in the edifice of an ordered interiority: it moves freely in an element of exteriority. It does not repose on identity: it rides difference. It does not respect the artificial division between the three domains of representation: subject, concept and being; it replaces restrictive analogy with a conductivity that knows no bounds”.
Despite occasional intrusions of figuration, it nevertheless seems apt to characterize Hassan’s work as ‘abstract’. Thus he is perhaps part of that strand of contemporary painting which Tony Godfrey, the author of the 2009 publication ‘Painting Today’, calls ”ambiguous abstraction”. Interestingly, Godfrey points out that no other area in painting has developed such a complex and theoretical literature as abstraction. He points out that many looked to the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, “for whom the key metaphor was the rhizome, a plant that grows not from a seed but from elements of itself, constantly spreading across the ground and re-rooting themselves”. Furthermore, he explains that “in a world where the hierarchy descending from God has disappeared, such a network, with its almost infinite numbers of routes, is another way of explaining how the world and the human neural system works”.
When we talk about the ‘human neural system’ we are simultaneously talking about the structure, which produces consciousness. As Douglas Hofstadter asks in his book ‘I am a strange Loop’: “ can a self, a soul, a consciousness, an ‘I’ arise out of mere matter? If it cannot, then how can you or I be here? If it can, then how can we understand this baffling emergence?”. These are still existential questions today, questions that I feel Hassan, on the evidence of his work, might also find compelling. Art can be a means of exploring self and the mind. The making of art is an evolving process: I am ‘I’ who is becoming ‘I’ who is not I.
Imants Tillers, August 2011
TODAY ALL OF YOUR PLANS ARE GOING TO BE SUCCESSFUL
/ 2010
Ariel Hassan is an artist concerned with beauty. Ignoring current trends in post-minimalism, he creates works which reach out and communicate with the viewer. Anything but mute, they invite an exchange. Hassan’s work features scientific forms although it is not scientific in character. A key difference is that science pursues answers, whereas Hassan is interested in the unresolved tension of the unanswered question.
He embraces and celebrates the unknown.
Today all your plans are going to be successful! is a collection united less by technique or style than ideas and concepts. With these works, Hassan continues his exploration of aspects of personality, character and the inner and outer spaces. He strives to achieve a balance between form and composition where details are vital and chaos is enjoyed.
Hassan spent his childhood in the family’s toy store; he did not just play with the toys around him but enjoyed setting up displays and creating a staged environment. This sense of theatricality and playfulness continues in his work today.
Hassan did not attempt to sculpt the meteorites of Today all your plans are going to be successful! into preconceived shapes; instead he intuitively responded to the material. Perhaps these meteorites have travelled through space, maintaining their form through the earth’s atmosphere and we see them just before the moment of impact. Then, uncertainty, with the possibility of preservation of integrity or complete destruction, thus suggesting a new dawn after cataclysm.
Whilst his canvases are filled with colour and intricate forms, they also subtly, but no less forcefully, feature space. Hassan meticulously creates unstructured canvases, allowing the positives and negatives to engage in dialogue. From random origins, patterns develop which are utilised to create something original. His Ghost paintings feature footprints from the past that follow him during his life long journey. These large scale paintings rest upon limbs, standing comfortably and yet suggesting that if one does not choose to engage with them, they may well initiate the connection.
Waters are wiser than we reflects the artist’s commitment to self nourishment and development. Reminiscent of Islamic carpets, Mathématiques Modernes creates a universal harmony via pattern and information repetition. With Again and again and again, Hassan draws upon moments of transition and the fading of existing systems. This feeds the ‘hüzün’ in him. Orhan Pamuk in his 2005 novel Istanbul describes Hüzün as
a feeling of melancholy, angst and a deep spiritual loss but also a hopeful way of looking at life, a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating.
Hassan’s work celebrates life in all its aspects. Uncommonly balanced, death and sadness are acknowledged as vital and welcomed as such. Playing with ideas of scale, magnifying the microscopic, highlighting darkness and organising randomness, Hassan has created a highly personal collection that challenges the viewer vigorously, intellectually and emotionally.
- Stephanie Lane
A FEW PEOPLE LAUGHED, A FEW PEOPLE CRIED, MOST PEOPLE WERE SILENT / 2008
Ariel Hassan works with great care and precise control to make objects that explore uncontrolled chaos. His use of hard-edged geometry as well as fluid amorphousness (often combined in the same work) may seem contradictory, but in fact he offers an accurate representation of the nature of things.
Contained within the immense complexity of a living body, a society, a planet or a universe, are individually functioning but connected systems and processes that are themselves highly complex. Each is subject to precise laws and principles (laws of nature, laws of physics, council by-laws, rules of the game). With infinitely proliferating variables, each of them potentially able to affect the others, the scope for unpredictability is endless. Life as we know it is both strictly governed and essentially out of control.
This is the paradox that motivates Hassan’s work as an artist. Everyone has a personal response to the conundrum of infinity, and knows the queasy sensation of confronting the idea that space is infinitely expanding and there is no end to it all. Some cry, some laugh, most are silent. Many turn to religion. Hassan makes art.
He breaks things down to individual components, with the implicit understanding that they could be put back together again differently, recombined into an ever-expanding, evolving and mutating continuum. One link in the chain implies an infinite proliferation. It is beyond the physical resources of an artist to capture the full ramifications of endless expansion, so Hassan tends to go back the other way, exploring smaller and smaller divisions and subdivisions. In either direction, it’s an open-ended process.
His imagery and his approach to making art seem reminiscent of medical science. Crystalline structures and organic processes in nature can be clearly recognised among his points of reference. While there is a definite similarity between his studio methods and experimental studies in a laboratory, he expresses no particular interest in medical research. It is the underlying principle of ebb and flow that gives meaning to his work, not the specific scientific facts.
The HFV project looks and sounds as though it might be based on studies in pathology. In fact the term HVF (Hypothetical Future Value) comes from the vocabulary of financial investment and the stock market. In these works, recognisable portraits are overlaid with free-flowing swirls in a shared black and white tonal scale that allows coherent and incoherent form to blend ambiguously. This occurs more thoroughly in the loop projection of the portraits, when afterimages start to confuse the retina. The possibility of fixed identity is undermined, and certainty is replaced by the prospect of an infinite potential, on which a philosopher, like a share trader, might speculate.
Hassan doesn’t regard what he makes as self-contained objects and images. Instead he discusses them as captured phases of an ongoing progression. Many artists talk this way when describing the relationship between their individual works and the development of their oeuvre as a whole, but Hassan isn’t talking about the steps that comprise his own path. He observes the continuously changing and developing forces of nature and attempts to isolate individual moments for closer study. ‘I can’t make new paintings,’ he says, ‘ I can only find them within chaotic primal exercises and try to emulate them in different technical stages; I can’t formulate sculptures but only try to decipher the system involved and rearrange the pieces.’ He temporarily and artificially suspends perpetual motion and presents a fixed image of flux. All artists do that too, but Hassan is not so much concerned with the thing that’s constantly changing; instead he makes art about the process of change itself.
Two of the works in this exhibition, The Geometry Of Resistance and Last Love Scene, resemble frozen explosions. The structural basis of both of them is derived from blood crystallisation, so the gradual systematic structuring essential to life is presented in such a way that it could also be read as abrupt fragmentation. Hassan’s macrocosmic/microcosmic vision of the universe combines the big bang with the orgasm.
The smallest component of the exhibition A void has been created, a void has to be closed is a fat worm. This automatically brings to mind the concept of worm holes, the shortest direct links within and between universes, travelling through space via time. This idea, so simple as an analogy, so difficult to grasp in reality, is invoked then left for the viewer to worry about. Hassan openly acknowledges the commonplace fact that the more we know, the more we realise we know very little.
His worm is curiously different from the other works. It is a distinct being rather than a configuration of parts, and in a perverse way it’s quite cute. It personifies the abstract process represented in Hassan’s work and gives it a face. Two in fact. Something unknowably and indefinably vast is brought down to a completely accessible level as a kind of logo. It stands for something much greater than itself. The two-faced, double-ended worm could be read as a symbol of endless circularity or a creature that could gobble itself into oblivion. Aside from what it might actually mean, this small sculpture reveals that within the disconcerting portentousness of Hassan’s work there is sometimes a playfully mischievous sense of humour.
Despair may be the most logical response to profound uncertainty, but it is absolutely not Hassan’s response. His anxious awareness of chaos accommodates the competing fragments of structural logic within it, and enthusiastically engages with them. Works of art are able to propose perfect, hypothetical resolutions of unresolved problems. Hassan labours long and hard to achieve this, with impeccable, crystalline models of random progression, and paint surfaces that are slowly and meticulously rendered like a painting-by-numbers version of an abstract expressionist canvas. His painstaking technique as an artist leaves no room for accidents, yet it is used for expressing a belief that the identity of everything depends on its potential not to go according to plan.
- Timothy Morrell
TBMFK / 2004 - 2009
Just what is it that makes Ariel Hassan's paintings so alive, so freshly compelling?
In them, to be certain, one can immediately see the familiar lineaments of the micro/macro cosmos pushed beyond cliche. Hassan's titles suggest imbrication with the up front and physical, with bodily events, perhaps, and their electrical correlations. Yet the artist also talks of aspiring to be a satellite. It is, apparently, no coincidence the pictures could pass, at a first glance, for NASA photographs of earth or Hubble details of gaseous fields, as well as chemical admixtures much closer to hand. Straight away we have polar extremes, the close up and the long shot, combined as if one. The works look like a species of Abstract Expressionism at first glance, while closer inspection reveals a careful hand has been at work--another enriching opposition. The pictures effectively embody indications of chaotic creation and a controlling, dispassionate intelligence.
The artist very consciously deploys this binary as a key part of his modus operandi. The resultant paintings manifest the proposition that the universe can be beautiful, even as they bear the marks of the artist's mediation of that beauty, his necessary participation in the processes concerned. Beauty, we might allow, is not the consequence of an aesthetician's recipe book, or purely an effect of culture, but the result of a particular dynamic between an individual and particular prompts 'out there'. The fullest experiences of beauty invoke precognitive and cognitive levels of understanding working across a register of the inchoately biological to the variously cultural--from the deep, even the dumb, to the 'cool'. All of this one might sense in looking at Hassan's work, adding to the satisfaction it offers.
The work, then, manifests and moves towards synthesising the two principal and opposing attitudes commonly held towards the production and experience of visual imagery. The first one might call the Reception Theory, which has it that beauty (or truth) is objectively exists, and we receive it if our antennae are sensitive enough. Much more fashionable in recent decades is what one might designate the Projection Theory, that the eye of the beholder projects what beauty it finds through the lens of cultural conditioning. The former animates traditional Aboriginal art, Australia's greatest art movement to date, so historical contingency alone might give pause to idly rejecting it - place, we should grant, is not necessarily irrelevant to art and culture (and we might note in passing that Hassan's work is nothing if it is not also a kind of mapping). Beauty theory within analytic philosophy gives contemporary logical support to such perspectives, just as Hassan's prints and sculptures, in focussing on the brain and skull, draw particular attention to the role of mind and body in the production and content of his work.
But back to my initial question. The viewer of Hassan's paintings becomes conscious of the artist watching himself as he scrupulously positions each mark. It is a little like viewing a Cezanne, though the result looks far more like late than early modernism, while invoking a range of contemporary artists, from Gerhard Richter to Glenn Brown, in its ultra-careful reworking of a familiar style. The work suggests what some would regard as an oxymoron, an intelligent abstract expressionism. Here lies much of the pleasure, surely: the joy of myriad forms including unexpected colour shifts and tonal leaps--sudden greens in predominantly pink paintings, for example, and richly dark vacancies in otherwise high key canvases--coupled with the reassurance of high intelligence.
- Ian North, 2006
ELECTROFLUIDS SERIES
/ 2001 - 2003
MISCELLANEOUS
