EPI

Human integuments are in constant dialogue with their environment, on the one hand; on the other, they delimit themselves from the latter and form a shield against particular mechanical and chemical influences. A principle of protection and sealing that lends the human surface a certain stability of form, among other properties. In skin’s dialogic relationship with the environment, personalized contact surfaces are opened up to its wearer by courtesy of visual or tactile relatedness. Zones of subjective reality that model man. In Hans' digital constructions, partial elements of this skin-stable form are blended with textures from the man- produced world of objects. Hans arranges this clash of forms and textures as a unit, as a dialectic game between subject and object. Within this synthetic game of alternating object references, an aesthetic form unfolds that points functionally to an allegorically interpretable notion of “visual recombination”. The method arrives at congruity at the point where subject and object, as a result of fusion, generate a change in the register of attribution of meaning and generically safeguard the image’s category against appropriation as a result of the generated ambivalence.

In this work, Hans constructs reality as a self-referential system, in which the subject constantly looks at, feels, steps into itself, walks in its own objective footsteps and is obliged, for a start, to process the gain in information when spatial body and body space coincide. Hans succeeds in revealing this gain in an impressive way, by loosening the feature-combinations of our collective perceptive schemata from their historical and traditional path dependencies, generating associative unrest and disturbing and beguiling the retinal by means of unfamiliar patterns of stimuli. Forceful and divisive, patinating and animalizing elements dynamize and dismember his dermal textures, expand and objectivize them into material surfaces of organically technical duplexity. The richly varied objective materiality and multi-layered subjective texture of his work is presented as both a surface spectacle and subcutaneous derma-objectification. Detached, redeemed and dammed up, there arise traumatic cracks, Eternit-armoured foot claws, facial fragments with planar distortions and dense pores. Visual epiphanies of a new order which, in Hans’ “EPI” – far away from lofty promises of salvation – digitally capture the constructive character of reality and exhibit the human as the object of his objects. If one applies modern production relationships and genetic creation fantasises of high-spirited biologists to his surreal-looking textures, the uncertainty remains as to how far the impossible-looking aspect of his images already pre-formulates the reality of tomorrow.