Hannes Postma - Large - 1985 - mixed media on paper "Hypno's mug" signed - Sold

• Medium: mixed media (gouache, watercolor, ink)
• Dating: 1985
• Numbered:
• Signed: monogram bottom right
• Condition: In very good condition - very nice colours
• Titled: "Hypno's Mug"
• loose-leaf - sheet size 50 x 65 cm

• Hannes Postma (Haarlem, 1933 - Amsterdam 2020)

"Viewed up close, the people in Hannes Postma's drawings aren't exactly pleasant to look at. At the very least, they're stretched into rolls, or compressed into bundles of arms and legs. They're constantly in a state of violent turmoil, rising, floating, or being shot across the surface, colliding, getting caught up in explosions, and being shredded by sharp-edged surfaces. Their hands and feet detach, multiply, and fly into space. Their heads transform into balloons, which expand into bodies a bit further away. They collide with all sorts of cosmic furniture (shelves, chests, clothes hangers, hats, undulating crusts) that make space unsafe... Of course, it's not without significance that Hannes Postma composes with shapes that evoke our own world, and not with circles and squares. His space is a real space, though near and far have become interchangeable, an immense space in which the earth appears fragmentary... The events, the sharp edges, touch us through the drawn flesh. On a visible stream of color, wordless balloons drift out of our field of vision like clouds of smoke or drops of blood. The boxes contain surprises (and not just pleasant ones; Postma calls them Pandora's boxes), embryos, fragments of landscape, and water; perhaps they are also shelters. Helpless people hang opposite the cosmic authority of enormous coats and hats, in a world where everything, including themselves, is simultaneously itself and something else, or at least in the process of becoming something else. "Hannes Postma is an image-maker, someone who, like a magician, evokes people and spaces. But he is also a viewer of those images, who observes all that struggling with a certain irony and is capable of playing jokes on a mysterious person. Without imposing his personality on us, he speaks a very personal language." This is partly evident from the title, Hocus Focus. The title and the lithographs are a clear statement in which a small intervention creates new insights. Postma associates a new word with meaning; language is living matter. The title is "a pun." The traditional incantation is "hocus pocus pilatus pas," where the trick is for something to briefly disappear or appear. It's the sensation of the curtain opening, the story beginning, and the tension of the moment of wonder felt with transformative power. The first lithograph also reads: "Two is infinitely one in focus." Focus means focal point, or something like mental orientation. However, it is used as the word "attention." Attention is: directing the faculty of perception to a single point. By using the word "focus," the emphasis is no longer on what the mind itself is doing, but on the subject to which attention is directed, the "focal point." In the rhyming "Hocus Focus," Postma shifts the meaning slightly (in just one letter) and decisively to the focal point, the magical moment of wonder of Hocus and Focus in its infinity.