A work by Hans Aichinger

"Aichinger’s current realism has something inevitable, something

mercilessly direct about it. The pointed placement of his figures in

the Euclidean clarity of the pictorial space looks almost monstrous.

The presence of personnel and a backdrop that repudiates

any enlightened understanding oft he picture produces a

naturalistic-looking certainty of being, which is shocking to look at,

in part because the seemingly almost tangible figures have fallen

into a kind of lifeless rigidity, as if they were cut off from the

eternally pulsating vital current, only to remain fixed between the

things surrounding them for all eternity. Here, it is as if a truth

inherent in the medium of the painting were being somewhat

unscrupulously revealed.

[...] Hans Aichinger’s new paintings represent a vehemently allegorical

realism, in which the conditio humana of the present is illustrated on

well-calculated stages. It is painted anthropology that technically and

poetically, as it were, dovetails grandly with an allegory of the

medium of painting. The thread running through all his recent paint-

ings is the theme of the creature that creates itself—homo faber

and divino artista, so to speak—in search of the meaning of its exis-

tence. Frequently, Aichinger manages to present in individual paint-

ings, precisely by means of the exaggeratedly posed quality of their

figures, a symbolic contend that goes beyond the level of concrete

action. This results in parable-like paintings à clef of a human exis-

tence that connects the course of time. [...] Hans Aichinger’s allegories

obtain their disturbing effect from a connection—one that is sensed

more than actually seen—to a contemporary aesthetic conveyed by

cool realism with archetypal forms of thought that rise out of the

symbolic worlds of old, increasingly forgotten myths, resulting in a

peculiar afterlife in the garb of the present.

[...] The extreme sharpness, capturing every point on the picture

plan, in which he causes the viewer to see his symbolic figures,

should be understood as an efford to outdo photography’s claim to

reality—which in the meanwhile has taken on almost mythological

status in the media age—and hence as a joyful affirmation of the

concept of illusionism. On the other hand, Aichinger seems to be

removing from the contemporary production of paintings the

media-reflective and media-imitative veil—which has become a

formative stylistic influence in order to focus again on the reality in

the image on the canvas. The resulting, virtually blinding clarity of

the pictorial events can be seen as a question about the truth of the

world. But that can be understood only by a medium that depicts a

reality that is deceptive—indeed, even false by nature—when

measured against the living.“ 1

Joachim Penzel, art historian, curator and publicist, talking with

Hans Aichinger about pictorial spaces and the space of the observer,

being human and the sense of being, timelessness and a tangible

claim to reality, all summed up in the essay „By Nature False—or,

The Truth of Painting“.

1. From: Joachim Penzel „By Nature False—or, The Truth of Painting“. In: Mono-

graph: „Hans Aichinger. Truth or Duty“ Hirmer 2013.

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