Möbius, Van Hanegem, Frith
Amsterdam 1987, studio in Rijksacademie. Knock, knock, "inside" is growled. Rasta hair on the head a Zeeuw at heart, a suspicious but also curious look.
What is entering my domain? A contemporary who attended De Ateliers 63, bastion of modernist belief. Van Hanegem has been gripped by the post modern virus, or should I say infected. After some laborious back and forth, his fondness for Rob Scholte floats to the surface. He himself creates extremely cleverly painted "pastiches" on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century painterly art, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Piero della Francesca to name a few. He combines these fresco-based images with canvases you associate with modernism, and he inserts geometric elements: postmodernism at work.
Is this a deconstructive, eclectic, end of the art-artist in vogue at the time? Or is there, after all, a "sneaky" great love for painting with, at that time, particularly painting from the trecento and quattrocento? Here is what is going on, young artist is gripped by the new dogmas of postmodernism but deep in his heart is also fascinated by painting and making images that go beyond ironic commentary on centuries of art making.
Many more conversations follow, not always easy. The rasta lion is somewhat stolid and not quick to show the back of his tongue. Oddly enough, he does not like reggae and has nothing to do with Bob Marley. He likes tight, experimental music, Zappa, Beefheart, Frith, mainstream is anathema. He says he cannot live without music, it is very important to him. His interlocutor is neither a modernist nor a postmodernist, which provides more than enough conversation material, especially since there is the suspicion that we are dealing with something special here.
Amsterdam 1995, Van Hanegem's studio. The rasta hair is off, we are in a completely different world, gone are the direct references to existing art, gone trecento and quattrocento. Postmodernism as professed belief seems far away. He now stands on the shoulders of art history, art history he knows through and through. In its place are dizzying constructions of architectural forms and grids, leaning heavily on isometric perspective and a tangle of winding serpents, meandering paint strokes, here and there organic bursts reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism. Abstract Expressionism is an old love, in particular Willem de Kooning, just pay attention to certain colors in his work, "The Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point" is near.
Deceiving the eye is also clearly a set-up, Escher comes to mind, work with which Van Hanegem is well acquainted, but Van Hanegem is different, his work is harder and less anecdotal, from a tennis ball shooting by in an otherwise almost "abstract" painting you don't look away and what could pass for narrative (that tennis ball, for example) is minimal and restrained. This is where Van Hanegem's universe with which he will become known really begins, highly mathematical, constructed, accurate and tending toward great perfection. Van Hanegem is a second cousin of the great Dutch soccer player Willem van Hanegem, made world famous for his passes, curves kicked with great accuracy. DNA crawls where it can't go.
Berlin 2003, Van Hanegem's studio. Amsterdam is 50% finished, from now on Van Hanegem spends half his time in Berlin, where he has now rented a floor with a studio. Quirky as he is, he sits where he feels excitement. The work is largely without recognizable figures, some would call them abstract. Topology, a part of mathematics that deals with properties of figures that are preserved when deformed, and the Möbius band (a topological phenomenon) are very prominent in the work. Blob-like forms, sometimes simple and flat, sometimes extremely complicated and three-dimensional where the eye does not know where to look, often in hard colors with which soft transitions in colors then contrast. Soft transitions that give the plasticity of the forms an unreal look. He has become a master of the spray gun. Escher also created a famous Möbius work, the one with the ants titled "Möbiusband II," a work Van Hanegem has known well since his teenage years. Yet Van Hanegem's work is quite different, as already mentioned: very precise and "clever" but harder, no anecdote, less "fun.
Andratx, Mallorca, 2005, Van Hanegem's studio at the Centro Cultural Andratx.
After a long conversation about his very complicated and magical constructions and a decent gulp from his bottle of beer, Van Hanegem carelessly says "actually, I would have liked to study mathematics or architecture first."
Berlin 2019, Van Hanegem's studio. Van Hanegem now lives permanently in Berlin but is also often in Vlissingen where he was born and raised. Sometime around 2010, Van Hanegem bumped into K.O. Götz, the old German master of informal painting who died in 2017 0p 103 years old (who says art is unhealthy?). It was a thud of recognition. Here Van Hanegem himself: always I was enamored with the language of the abstract-expressionists but Götz had that handwriting that I recognized immediately. Van Hanegem recognized something in Götz that could combine his fascination with mathematics and topology and his love for informal painting. Again Van Hanegem himself: In this gesture-painting there was still plenty of room to post-correct the 'gestures', and implant them completely in my own 'architectural models'. Post-correcting requires some explanation. Van Hanegem is crazy enough to 'correct' with small brushes the ferocious excesses of paint, as it were, on a micro level, to re-fashion, to re-plastify. Desire for perfection in the formal or an absolute will to bend the image to his will, obviously the latter.
In the studio paintings, finished and still being worked on. The clearly geometric and architectural models of the past are now overgrown or heavily overgrown or overgrown by ferocious brushstrokes reminiscent of K.O. Götz's paint excesses. Almost like ruins in a jungle or forest. You can clearly still see the traces of a structure, the skeleton of the image, the brushstrokes have an equally important function, they have merged. There is a synthesis, a new whole, in which the brushstrokes, however paradoxical, stand as a building and not as a downed paint accident. The brushstrokes have themselves become architecture, next to, on and within the geometric skeleton. In Van Hanegem's current work, architecture and geometric models feel at home in chaos and chaos feels at home in architecture and geometry.
Amsterdam, 2020, Galerie Eenwerk, Here work by Van Hanegem is presented. What we see is that his fascination with mathematics, architecture and the expressive informal have come to a complete synthesis. With this work, Van Hanegem is at the provisional peak of his powers.
Han Schuil, Amsterdam 2020.
Van Hanegem about himself:
I’ve always been fascinated by the illusion of space on a flat surface. In my first work I researched the mathematical perspective as it was developed in the Early Renaissance. The central perspective starts from a static point of view; this may look credible but does not reflect how we actually look – with a wandering eye scanning the visible world. To simulate this scanning I stretched the canvas on a curved and elongated stretcher and I combined two landscapes by Lorenzetti in one representation. In a subsequent series of works I employed other spatial structures, including the isometric and grids of diagonal and sometimes wavy screens. These structures formed the basis for architectural representations and an Escher-like play with depth, in which ‘above’ and ‘below’ are shuffled. I also examined the painterly means themselves on their spaciousness, and for instance wondered how one could paint the back of the brushstroke.
In my more recent work, the spaciousness is no longer clearly orientated towards the perspective. The dimensions in my work are difficult to identify precisely. I focus on spaciousness inspired by phenomena from the topology, a branch of mathematics. For example the Klein Bottle and Möbius strip. Both refer to an endless, closed surface. A plane with seemingly two sides (front and back), but still one and the same surface causing front and back, top and bottom to overlap inseparably. Sometimes executed in a sleek and architectural way, at other times expressive by nature.
The most recent works are mainly expressionist, material plays a greater role in the creation, yet it is often constructed as architecture.
For me these ‘impossible’ structures represent special areas, ‘thinking spaces’ you might say. Areas where you can wander infinitely, not only with your eyes but also also mentally. These are areas in which you are absorbed as a viewer: undefined, virtual spaces where you weightlessly float and bob around like in a bathtub filled with foam, undergoing a sense of bliss.