Hans Aichinger

Hans Aichinger's works (painting, oil on canvas) are filled with concentration: firstly in the way he uses it to paint the highly accurate figures, and through the tension that is placed in the minds of the characters themselves. This concentration does not reveal its object as it lies outside of the frame - without reference - in the open. Thus, Aichinger creates a harmony between figuration and abstraction, and at the same time, he makes the legibility of the images possible and impossible.

The figures are performing on a minimalist stage, no portraits, mostly soloists without concrete opponents - but with counter-stands, or resistances: a wooden stick, stuffed animals, pebbles, toys or, even more, reduced, with a physical gesture - as an expression of internal compression. We are confronted with mainly adolescents still on the way to the acceptance of one's appearance, with naive self-assurance and openness. Background and space are strangely indefinite and speechless, and in the medium format, the figures appear almost life-size at eye level with the viewer.

The ambivalence of works such as »Abnehmendes Licht« (»diminishing light«) or »Unruhe« (»unrest«) have an explicit yet undefined side, it is here where the works begin to assert their abstraction. The indefinite "assumption of form" in Aichinger’s works presents the protagonist on the one hand, but same time the pictorial content is both objective and abstract. This suspicion is supported in Aichinger's precise accuracy, which goes beyond any realism and where the form begins to dissolve.

These elements, which are almost microscopically alien to the detail, have no specific meaning but are there to direct our perception. Thus the abstraction comes into the work subtly by taking short detours along the way. His inclination towards the non-representational ideal image comes from Aichinger surprisingly close - albeit from an unexpected direction.