Foreword
by Helmut A. Müller
Text contribution by the editor for the publication PHASIS and for the exhibition with the same name at Hospitalhof Stuttgart, January 2010
Pictures, like seasons and spaces, take their life from atmospheres. Times, spaces and atmospheres form the basis for perception. Painting seems to have a different temper on a cold winter’s night than it does on a hot summer’s day. It is perceived differently in a gallery than it is in a church. After the Feast of the Epiphany the scent of the festively decorated Christmas tree still hangs in the air in Stuttgart’s Hospital Church. You can smell the pine needles, feel the cold, taste the snow. Philipp Haager’s ink painting Triadras reminds you then of snow-bedecked forests, icy winds and frozen lakes. Others might envision thick clouds scudding across the winter sky. Still others, shadow-plagued times in their own inner being.
For the Städel master student, born in 1974 in Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, painting has become a personally inflected path. Haager has been led along this path in the course of coming to terms with his own existence. While practicing painting, he has inescapably been confronted with the major questions of humanity: the question of the secret of life, the questions of where we come from, where we’re going and why, and the question of God.
Every modernist painter knows that his pictures react to others that have already been painted. Painting has hence become a kind of ongoing reflection on the essence, the end, and perhaps also still on the possible future of painting. Any post-secular modernist painter can conversely ask anew whether what he paints shows who we are. Painting then possibly becomes a foil for constructing the world according to one’s own particular perspective. But a painter might also wonder whether creativity reveals itself in his work, the élan vital, the creative force, life, the divine. Painting would then stand, among other things, for the longing to be God-like. It would want to know whether the snake with its “Thou shalt be as God” was right. And whether God “only forbids those to eat from the Tree of Knowledge who will perish by it,” but in turn revitalizes those “that penetrate to the essence beyond form” (Thomas Ring).
Be that as it may: we sense that the atmospheres of Haager’s pictures reflect his answers. Unlike the philosophical, psychological, mathematical, physical or theological discourses, they do not choose the language of logic, formulas or numbers. They put their faith in experience and in perception. They mark stations along a path that leads us to trust. Haager has consciously decided to follow this path at a speed he deems appropriate for himself, and to follow his own rhythm of life. He finds the staccato beat of today’s big cities and their vying for our attention superficial; it remains alien to him. This is why he leads a reclusive, rural existence. He works day after day, glaze after glaze, and layer after layer on the spatial depth and wide horizons, the lightness and heaviness exuded by his pictures. When, now and again, he succeeds at adding a new form, format or color scheme to the pictorial language he has developed to date, he knows he is on the right path. He assumes that something will then appear in his pictures that leads further and which transcends rationally describable relationships between cause and effect. Medieval theology connected this transcendence with God as the first efficient cause that brings about everything but is itself not caused by anything or anyone. Later theologians spoke of the world soul, the spirit animating the universe, and of our sense of and penchant for the infinite.
For Haager, all artistic processes are about this Other, about that which is missing. Painting seeks it out. As a painter, Haager is equipped with an “awareness of sensation” (Peter Schellenbaum: Spürbewusstsein) resembling that of a psychologist interested in getting at the fundamental processes of life. When Haager senses physically, mentally and psychically what is missing, and sees it beginning to rise before his inner eye, he has a chance of letting it enter the world.
Before the exhibition “Phasis (Pictures for Our Lord),” Haager’s paintings were deep black with surfaces like velvet. This saturated black already portended the red and green paintings he is now showing. After years of limiting his palette to black, gray and white, Haager still never indulges fully in the color red and its complementary shades. It is instead as though a different sun had risen over the pictorial space. We must remember that Haager, who is partially color blind, already sees pure gray differently than others do. This is why he shied away from using colors in his painting for a long time. Triadras with its dominant black, its filmy gray, the yellow tones showing through from the raw canvas and its very finely nuanced light blue tones stands for this hesitancy and is for Haager a very colorful picture. To him, it tastes like air, smells like sky and represents vastness. It thus can be regarded as the origin of his Near Field series. That series consists so far of five large-format paintings and, except for the first work, is being exhibited here for the first time.
The black vertical-format painting Near Field Phase 1, which is not on view, is animated by a bundle of light rays falling down vertically from above and rending apart the black that has dominated up to now.
The horizontal-format Near Field Phase 2 is still black, but in an appealingly festive way we are happy to embrace. Near Field Phase 2 becomes an interior space we can experience both viscerally and emotionally, a psychic landscape. This psychic landscape no longer harbors anything ominous. We feel that something new is in the process of becoming here. The painting breathes the atmosphere of an impending birth.
With Near Field Phase 3, likewise a horizontal format, a new color scheme and formal composition are let loose on the world. Here, an invigorating, powerful, warm and erotic red radiates from the canvas, one with the taste of raspberries and the scent of roses and one that demonstrates how even the deepest of blacks still conceals life and love.
Of the five works, Near Field Phase 4 with its broad spectrum of brown, yellow and red underlying the turquoise-green most resembles classic landscape painting and the attempt made by the Romantic painters to symbolize the transition to transcendence using spatial metaphors. Near Field Phase 4 lets us imagine a kind of horizon between the accessible foreground and out-of-reach, infinite background. But this horizon flows differently from that of the Romantics, both toward us and into the distance. All the same, one thinks when standing before Near Field Phase 4 of forests and clearings in different shades of green, of meadows and late summer light, and finally of orchards of fruit trees through whose leaves patches of light fall on the ground. It is not yet autumn. But we can already smell it; apples, pears and plums are beginning to ripen. We look forward to the upcoming harvest.
Near Field Phase 5, finally, reminds us with its interior pulsating in various red tones of an embryo just opening its eyes for the first time and seeing the blood flowing in the placenta. In this large-format painting there is nothing more to be felt of the morbid charm of iron chloride and grease on old papers with which Haager set out many years ago on the way to his studies at Frankfurt’s Städel school.
In Near Fields, Phases 1-5 Haager meditates on his life up to now. Art and life intertwine. The atmosphere has become saturated and dense with energy. We sense that Haager has arrived. His painting shows who he is today, what he thinks, what he feels.
Picture Sermon
by Helmut A. Müller
on January 10, 2010, at the Hospital Church in Stuttgart,
on the occasion of the Philipp Haager exhibition “Phasis (Bilder dem Herrn)“
Inquiring into God and the Beautiful has become one of my most fulfilling life tasks. I can no longer do otherwise. I know that Jürgen Habermas once said of himself that he was religiously non-musical. I witness day after day how few people in this world dare to make aesthetic judgments, and I realize that my answer to the question of what is beautiful is different from that of others. But I nonetheless suspect that everyone devotes some thought to beauty and to God. Everyone has a sense of and a taste for eternity. And hence everyone also has religion. Everyone has a sense of and a taste for what is beautiful. And hence everyone also ponders what beauty is. Of course, not everyone deals professionally with aesthetic judgments and not everyone makes religion their career. But each of us lets himself in for a lifelong fascination with religion and with art.
For Philipp Haager, if I understand him correctly, the questions “What do you think of religion?” and “What do you think of art?” are conjoined, at least on the level of the final horizon and the horizon of life. That explains why he is not afraid to call his exhibition “Phasis (Pictures for Our Lord).” This would hardly have been conceivable on the art scene twenty years ago. Phasis, Greek for “appearance, epiphany, manifestation,” and also used to describe the rising of a star, resembles the Ancient Greek word “phaos or phos” – meaning light, brightness. “Phaos, phos” encompasses the broad spectrum of meanings resonating in daylight or sunlight; the light of life, life or being itself; eyesight, eye; torch, lamp; happiness, salvation and helper, savior. In “phaos, phos,” like in the Greek verbs “phainein” (illuminate, make visible, bring into the light), “epiphainomai” (manifest oneself, appear) and in the German “Bohnern,” the Indo-Germanic roots “bha, bho, bhe” (shine, glow, appear) can be found. “Epiphany” means the manifestation, in the New Testament the manifestation of Christ, his becoming man and his return to Earth. The Greek “phantasma” means a dream image or illusion, a phantom, and “phantasia” the mental, or imagined, picture.
The field of words associated with “phasis” indicates that the paintings Haager is exhibiting under this title have to do with the abundance of ways in which life manifests itself. And of course also with how the artist perceives these manifestations. Haager is fully aware that his way of seeing things builds on the perspectives of others before him and that his own gaze is necessarily limited by the conditions in which he lives.
The subtitle “Pictures for Our Lord” can at first be compared with dedications by book authors to persons important to them. But Haager’s dedication presumably means something broader in the religious context. In a Protestant church, one will automatically think of gifts and sacrifices in the Pauline sense and as construed by the Lutheran Paul Gerhardt.
The way in which Paul Gerhardt views songs is the way Philipp Haager sees his pictures. These pictures reflect the attitude of someone who knows he owes his life to someone else. One can then wonder whether and how this attitude is manifested in the pictures.
One of the tasks of art is to manifest something in the world that has never yet appeared, and to make visible what has not yet been seen. This is what distinguishes art from all other ways of accessing reality and constitutes its specific function. Art is about perceiving what has heretofore gone unseen. It is to be made visible. What has become visible can also be spoken of. The monotheistic religions, by contrast, are about what tends to remain hidden. The Jewish tradition thus places vital importance on the belief that, although God always manifests himself anew, no man can force him to appear, let alone capture his appearance. God reveals himself in the burning bush – not in a storm, not in a thundershower, but in the whisper of the wind after the storm and in the descending calm. And then he also shows himself, in the exodus from Egypt, as a column of fire by night and a cloud by day. Asked by Moses what his name is, he answers: “I am that I am.” I show myself as what I am. But I reserve the right to be something totally different at a later time. This is why Jewish theologians have agreed to forego any visible or speakable image of God. Even God’s name is no longer uttered. In the Temple of Jerusalem, an empty throne has been dedicated to God in the Holy of Holies – a throne for Our Lord – on which Yahweh can take a seat and manifest himself – or not.
We as Christians know all about the awe in which this topic is held in Israel. But unlike those in Israel, we assume that God ultimately did reveal himself credibly on Earth. He became Man, was laid in a manger in a stall as a baby, and could be worshipped on the Feast of the Epiphany by Magi from the Orient. On this feast day, which we celebrated just three days ago, we remember the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan and a life that was borne by the love of God, even when it ended in Jesus’ death on the cross.
The early Christians understood their encounters with the Risen One as God’s avowal of the crucified Christ and as a sign of the triumph of life over death. But none of these manifestations can be captured and pinned down for long. There are aspects of reality that elude our external faculty for seeing and demand our internal vision instead. We then speak of transcendence, of going beyond this world.
Our yearning drives us to this borderline. We long to see what comes next, to open the door that is still locked to us. To trace a picture that forms before our inner eye, to give shape to an image that appears in our soul. We want to place before our eyes that which is not tangible, so that we can get some idea of what it is we are unable to see. Strictly speaking, everything points in this direction: we need pictures to help us participate in life and to tackle the tasks posed by life. We are nurtured by pictures that allow us to blissfully grow up, live our lives, and die. For Christian theologians, the most fitting pictures for this horizon of life and final horizon are those produced in the spirit of mercy and the love of God. Pictures like the Marriage at Canaan, where God personally made sure the best wine was served. Or pictures showing the sick being healed and the dead rising from their graves and ascending to Heaven. And, not least of all, the picture of the Crucified Christ, which displays like no other God’s boundless willingness to share his life and his love with man. With this picture, hope comes into the world that God’s love endures even beyond death.
‘Melting Memory’, 3 paravent screens, 380 cm x 620 cm, Indian ink, raw linen, metal stands
Installation behind the crucifixion group of Hans Seyffer, Hospitalchurch Stuttgart, January 2010
In 2010 Philipp Haager installed one of his paintings, a triptych called Melting Memory, behind Hans Seyffer’s crucifixion group from 1501 in the apse of the Late Gothic Hospital Church. Immediately evident is the way in which Haager’s intervention clarifies the formerly aesthetically unsatisfactory situation here. The space between the main elements pulpit, altar and baptismal font and the intricate stained glass windows from the 1960s became oppressively narrow when the church was rebuilt. Ever since then, the eye has been unable to find a purchase. Now, however, the apse exudes a feeling of calm. The visitor’s gaze no longer wanders back and forth restlessly. Mary Magdalene under the cross, Mary, Mother of Christ, and John now have a serene setting. At the same time, these stony figures have come to life in their pain and sorrow. Even though Jesus still hangs on the Cross, it seems as though he has already been freed from his earthly shackles, lifted and assumed into another world.
Melting Memory has become here a kind of last horizon or event horizon made up of color and space, one that potentially fuses within itself all the pictures that the evolution of the cosmos has produced. Up to this point, to this final horizon, we can still see with our “outer” eyes. But after God’s avowal of the Crucified Christ, our paschal, “inner,” eyes also see through this event horizon of color and space and beyond it.
Melting Memory is a variegated, balanced color field built up from the primary colors yellow, blue and red. It contains all other colors. On the left panel, the green spectrum dominates. The choir setting made the triptych format the most obvious choice for Haager; it is also reflected in the composition of Seyffer’s figural group. For a moment we might almost think that the figures dictated Haager’s flow of colors. But then we hesitate. We can sense a break with classical iconography here. In our cultural realm the colors ultramarine and lapis lazuli are associated with the figure of Mary, and not green. Haager has hence let himself be guided not by the figures, but by his unconscious mind, and has arrived at green for the left panel, red on the right, and in the middle a white-and-yellow field that seems to open up into space. To me, this progression of color represents nothing less than Christian theology’s wrestling to find an appropriate concept of God, wrestling with the possibility of seeing God at once as the one who creates and transcends the world and also as He who enters into this world and completes it. The tripartite triptych format is always a reference to the Holy Trinity as well. To God the Father, who orders chaos and who guarantees that our memory endures beyond the present moment. To God as ordering structure and as cosmic memory. We might therefore be inclined to connect the green panel with the first person in the Holy Trinity, reminded here also of the green and vital power proposed by the mystic Hildegard von Bingen. A moss green at the upper edge of this panel. A dark, earthy green at the bottom. And in between light green and turquoise fields brimming with life.
In the middle panel the upper fields are bright, light white and yellow. The red fields in the middle segue into dark blue and brown tones at the bottom. This panel might stand for God as he devotes his attention to Man. God who came down to Earth and became Man. For Jesus of Nazareth, at whose baptism the heavens opened up. For the Son of God, who was resurrected from the dead by his Father.
Finally, the third panel with its crimson and blue hues seems to me to stand for the Holy Spirit, who here on Earth already opens up to us the gates to Heaven. It shows that our life has still other dimensions. The daily struggle for existence is not the end. Our breath remains the breath of God’s breath. Our spirit a wind, whisper and spirit of God’s spirit. As humans with body, soul and spirit we reach our goal when we sing the praises of the triune God and celebrate our life as sensible service to God in the everyday world. We have not yet reached our destination. But we are on our way to our designation and to our purpose in life, to our career as a vocation. We are en route as painters, theologians, gallerists, housewives or househusbands, mothers, fathers and so forth. Celebrating sensible service to God in the everyday world means orienting our lives with our minds, hearts, hands and reason toward the final horizon of the cosmos and knowing that what comes after is God’s mercy, his eternal basis in love. I think that Philipp Haager has dedicated his pictures to this eternal basis: “Pictures for Our Lord.”
