Fons Haagmans at Onrust - Amsterdam, Netherlands - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Fon Haagmans is individual of the Dutch artists associated with the venerable Art & throw out gallery who have been forced to look for exposure in a venue more accessible than that now-rural gallery (although he maintains his ties). His double exhibit at Onrust (big paintings at the large Planciusstraat space and smaller works at the original, diminutive Prinsengracht gallery) was a rare opportunity to diocese what he's up to.

Haagmans lives in the Catholic southerly of Holland. Religion, superstition and myth, as well as history, contribute to his bring under rule matter of jesters, relics, badges and the patterns of heraldry. He brings that world into the not absent by painting an empty tuxedo as a contemporary style of dress to be compared with that of a humorist or a Grim Reaper. What unites all his production is a simplification of sharply defined images, their centralized isolation upon a field that they nearly fill, and blunt-witteded colors.

The works have an iconic quality that may summon crude medieval woodcuts, Baroque decorative silhouettes or contemporary clip art, sometimes simultaneously. A jackass wearing spats and a r scarf longes across its canvas, while a death figure dances, exposing its bare leg and buttocks by dint of pulling at its costume while sticking without its long red tongue. In all the works, single senses energy working against weight or constraint. The paintings, have a physical nearness almost a muscularity. The heraldry pieces are simply large canvases loaded with wide vertical, horizontal or diagonal stripes. The surfaces are rather sheeny The colors are not the customary aggressive red or bright ceruleans of crests and pennants on the contrary sallow yellows, cold tans, forest verdant and olive, steely gray. The stripes are apparently not taped; their cutting sides are ragged. All told the paintings have a physicality that stops just short of Sean Scully's. (Haagmans himself speaks of Max Beckmann as an influence.)

Haagmans is also inspired by means of medieval liturgical objects now in museums. That's the source, perhaps, for several fresh paintings to which he has added 3-D "jewels." on the other hand it's a measure of his modernity that he recalls devotional external realitys by studding canvases with immense fake baubles that speak of glitz, not preciousness, and that do not repeat the traditional forms of gem-encrusted shrines or reliquaries. For example, he paints a divided, stylized tree with vast leaves (it makes me think of "Jack and the Beanstalk") from which clear paste jewels dangle like fantastic fruits. This homage, like his work as a whole, must be seen in big quotation marks as distanced and self-conscious.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group