Threshold Scapes 1999–2005

Between 1999 and 2004, Philipp Haager's landscape imagery gradually transformed from observations of vast open spaces and the natural world into atmospheric pictorial spaces. Horizons, woodland scenes and fragmented panoramas remain discernible, yet increasingly dissolve into light, nuance, movement, and processes of concentration and dispersion.

The Threshold Scapes mark a transitional phase. The experience of landscape en plein air becomes an imagined landscape, a kind of phantom image; observation of nature becomes an increasingly autonomous painterly interpretation. Within these works, questions emerge for the first time that would later find their most concentrated expression in the Black Works.

Drawing on the pastel drawings and watercolours of the Provence years, Haager initially sought to transfer their spontaneous and process-oriented image formation into oil painting. Pure pigments, linseed oil and partially oxidised iron chloride were applied to canvas, paper and cardboard, worked more with cloths and hands in a process of wiping and rubbing than painted with brushes. White served neither as a glaze nor as a means of overpainting but already existed as a structured ground onto which pigmented oil paint was directly polished with cloth. The desired fluidity of colour, together with the openness of this approach, increasingly encountered the material limitations of oil painting and ultimately led to a return to Indian ink as the central medium.

At the same time, the reduction of the colour palette that would later be intensified in the Black Works already begins to emerge. While works such as Without Sky (2002) or the large-scale Landscape Diptych (2003), with their airy greens and luminous colouration, still retain traces of conventional landscape painting, the works of 2004 and 2005 become increasingly restrained chromatically. The emphasis shifts decisively away from the depiction of landscape towards a kind of distillation of the landscape itself: atmosphere, pictorial space and the process of painting.