Odo Hans

The Line and the Dot. Surreal Legacies in the Photographic Oeuvre of Odo Hans.

Monika Körte

Odo Hans’ photographic works show themselves to be inspired by strategies of the exposure of parts, of dismemberment and faceting which have their firm place in 20th-century avant-garde art. Hans’ partial views correspond to surrealist methods and techniques of decontextualisation. He not only inherits the surrealist delight in the artistic autonomy and exposure of individual facial areas which makes his views look alien and improbable to us. His particular interest is directed towards formations on the surface, which is not comprehended as the subordinate expression of depth; the true seat of depth is found in the actual and privileged locale of the person. With his chosen edits, the photographer distances himself from disambiguating and homogenizing conceptions of the face, and approaches notions of the face as an entity or a structure whose wholly different geometric expansions and elevations has been possibly put together by chance, without any internal logic. “Compositions” is Hans’ name for the image details, which loosen the face-parts precisely from their “mutual dependence” which is crucial to the face’s impact and owe their surreal, dynamic momentum to the attributes light, perspective and macroscopy.

Human Surfaces

Dagmar Burkhart

In an age which celebrates skin-beauty in the sense of a smooth, hairless and spotless surface, Hans has recourse to the artistic resource of “making strange” that was demanded by the Russian Formalist Viktor Schklowski in 1916 in order to de-automate perception and steer it towards the essential. By bringing out the skin’s surface with every pigment spot, every wrinkle or bulge-like unevenness, with thickets of hair or shaved stubble as pointillist skin-rasterization, Hans compels the beholder into genuine seeing, as though the phenomenon were stepping before his eyes for the first time. Thus, in the found object SKIN (“objet trouvé” in the sense of object art) he allows a kind of landscape to arise, which calls on the beholder to reflect on beauty – or ugliness – in its relation to the natural, but also on the condition humaine in general. Odo Hans artistically enigmatic segment-photographs of furrowed, bulging, hairy or shaved human skin, scattered with pigmentation, show elements of Abstract Expressionism and thus generate a new kind of access to the body, including its grotesque dimensions with the likes of Mikhail Bakhtin in mind.

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