valentin hauri

At the moment

The modern period witnessed the liberation of art from all conceptual constraints. Today, any form of expression may claim the status of a contemporary work of art, although no such work is assured of acceptance or recognition. The historical avant-garde movements of the early years of the twentieth achieved this freedom and used it for their works, in manifestations, gestures and often breathtaking exhibitions. Art historiography has observed, documented and analyzed this line of development, applying an expanded concept of art in the attempt to apprehend and comprehend new forms of art through language. Because new media for art are continually being discovered in the course of this process, the question of the relevance of painting to contemporary art is raised over and over again. Generation after generation have banished the discipline of painting to history. And, with equal conviction, those artists who remain loyal to painting demonstrate that the painted image is indeed capable of keeping pace with developments in art. Painting is not immune to the influences of an expanding concept of art. And what is more, the ways in which painting is perceived are also subject to change. Production and reception evolve in a relationship of mutual dependence. As new art forms are created, new ways of seeing emerge as well.

Conditioned by an intensive study of conceptual art over the past few years, my own eye now recognizes certain qualities in Valentin Hauri’s painting that were hidden from me before. They are the products of the conditions under which these paintings were realized – conditions the artist plans down to the finest detail and deliberately incorporates into the creative process. In 1994, following his return from a long stay in London , his view of the painting process began to change, and that change continues to play a crucial role in his art today. In his early work, he focused on painting itself, and he painted with great intensity and pleasure. In those early years, Valentin Hauri often worked on several paintings at a time . The pictorial concept in these works is baroque. There is no specific iconography. The formats of these paintings were not predetermined but often changed from picture to picture. The craft and the culture of painting were essential to his concept of painting and his artistic practice. I recall an exhibition of painted glass I was privileged to organize for him in 1984. It was one of my first shows. Later, I lost track of his painting for the most part and saw only occasional examples of his work. The recent re-encounter has been a surprising, pleasant and instructive experience. In the 1990s, Hauri developed a new production technique for his art. Although technical skill remains a central factor in the painting process, the artist no longer views it as a temporally open-ended sequence involving the application of layers of paint, but defines it instead as a process of discovery that unfolds in accordance with rules set by the artist in advance.

Since 1994, Hauri has been using five different painting formats (50 x 45 cm, 70 x 63 cm, 110 x 100 cm, 130 x 117 cm, 160 x 144 cm, maintaining a consistent 10:9 proportion) and painting in the alla prima technique. Each painting is completed in a single work session. Nothing is overpainted in these works, and no corrections are made. Hauri compares alla prima painting to tossing dice. Although he possesses profound technical knowledge and has gained a wealth of experience in painting, he claims that he can never predict whether a painting will turn out right or not. Individual paintings cannot be produced, he says, but must be discovered. According to Valentin Hauri, the technical and mental preparations for painting are far more important now than they were in the 1980s and early 1990s. Technical preparations include in particular process of preparing of the painting substrate. Hauri uses cotton and paints only on a low-absorbent surface that has been hand-sanded several times. In contrast to the layering method used in the impasto technique, alla prima painting did not gain recognition until quite late (in the 19 th century) and is seldom employed by artists.

As a young painter, Hauri realized a wall drawing conceived by the American conceptual artist Sol LeWitt in collaboration with several other artists. When I think of Hauri’s discovery technique, I am reminded of the sixth sentence in LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art (1969), an important contribution to the theory of conceptual art. Here, he writes, “If the artist changes his mind midway through the execution of the piece, he compromises and repeats past results”. In sentence 5, we read: “Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.” Valentin Hauri was not a conceptual artist when he did the Sol LeWitt drawing, and his is still not a conceptual artist today. Yet he has since opened his art and allowed certain insights from Conceptual Art to infiltrate it – insights that relate to the foundations and the development of the painting process and which help the painting achieve a greater degree of autonomy. In his current painting, concept and manifestation are of equal importance.

Reproductions of paintings by other artists have served as sources of inspiration for many of the paintings completed in recent years. In conversation, Hauri mentions such artists as Forrest Bess, Else Blankenhorn and Henry Darger. It is often works by self-taught artists that fascinate him the most. What interests him about these pieces is that they are shaped by an artistic, social and personal vision and not by an academic view of art. In a well-known statement made in 1949, the French painter Jean Dubuffet spoke in this context of “raw” art. “Real art is always found where it is least expected! Where no one is thinking of it and no one calls it by name.” The focus of this kind of art is not the culture of painting, the proper use of the resources of painting; instead, it is the process of discovering the image that touches Valentin Hauri emotionally and stimulates him artistically. The artist refers to photographs of these works while painting. The paintings that emerge from this encounter are not translations of these pictures but rather attempts to enter into dialogue with them. As a rule, their titles are the same as those of the originals and thus serve to identify his sources. Hauri is fascinated and stimulated by both the incomparable pictorial structures of these paintings and their lack of perfection. Unlike Dubuffet, who appropriated the images and techniques of the so-called “Art Brut” he collected, Hauri transposes the pictorial impulses generated by his sources into his own painting culture. He does not attempt to expand the concept of the painting through his art but seeks rather to assimilate a singular, authentic pictorial discovery that touches him personally into the culture of painting. His recent paintings have the quality of ideas, yet they are paintings indeed. They are light, soft, clear, concentrated, and full of life. There is no solid corporeality in these works. Although the resources of painting are tightly controlled, Valentin Hauri’s painting seeks perfection and total absence of intention. These are paintings that appear to us like memories – inconceivable.

Roman Kurzmeyer, June 2005

The author lives and works as a curator and art scholar in Basel.