10. Philipp Haager

These gorgeous works by German painter Philipp Haager. ‘What is left, is if nothing is left (abridged) According Beat Wyss there are exactly two types of artists – those who deceive the perception skill and those who let them down deliberately. Philipp Haager belongs neither to one nor to the other group, for deceiving and disappointing at best theoretically belong to the applied arts maneuvers its picturesque imagery. His mostly large-scale paintings created in a nearly loving process of accumulation of matter, by applying ink on canvas and the subtraction of matter, through targeted washing off the ink with constantly sprayed water. What is left after a long and concentrated creative process are images such as “weather web” (2006), showing a submerged in white-gray-black color landscape. Rushing and wabernd sunbeams penetrate single cloud and fog formations that seem great while over wooded valleys with no name, like children who actually are far too old to play boisterous games. This ease is his pictures alike commonly enrolled as a heartfelt earnestness. A seriousness that seems to ask for the whole. Hague will probably therefore been linked to neo-romanticism in conjunction and Caspar David Friedrich and Joseph Mallord William Turner summoned as a reference. Could it be that these comparisons? In his studio you will find a number of unfinished pictures leaning against the walls and quietly in the specially provided vessels drip when she would weep or bleed, like slaughtered animals that are on the wall. Ink it is rather that runs continuously in black, thick drops out of the picture. Longer drying phases require re watering, a rhythm that dictates the nature of the image as well as light and shadow, compaction and loosening. Romantic they may still be considered only insofar as they show a kind of ideal landscape – an imagined Arcadia, however, that lost its innocence after the storm seems to have and is more than aware of his imperfections. Haagers images thus miraculously, what is left of a lost idea left. Frank-Thorsten Moll, head of the art department, the Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen.