Hannes Postma - "new figuration" oil paint washed with clay still life "figures and tableware"

• Hannes Postma (Haarlem, 1933)

Viewed up close, what happens to the people in Hannes Postma's drawings is not very pleasant. At the very least, they are stretched into a sort of loaves, or compressed into bundles of arms and legs. They are constantly in violent turmoil, rising up, floating or being shot across the plane, colliding, getting caught in explosions, and being divided into strips by planes with sharp edges. Their hands and feet detach, multiply, and fly into space. Their heads turn into balloons, which expand into bodies a little further away. They collide with all kinds of cosmic furniture (planks, boxes, coat hangers, hats, undulating earth crusts) that make space unsafe... Naturally, it is not without significance that Hannes Postma composes with forms that evoke our own world and not with circles and squares. His space is a real space, even though near and far have become interchangeable there, an immense space in which the earth appears fragmentarily... The events, the sharp edges, engage 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. Inside the boxes are surprises (and not just nice ones; Postma calls them Pandora's boxes), embryos, pieces of landscape and water; perhaps they are also shelters. Helpless little humans hang opposite the cosmic authority of enormous coats and hats, in a world where everything, themselves included, is simultaneously itself and something else, or at least in the process of becoming something else. Hannes Postma is an image maker, someone who conjures up people and spaces like a magician. But he is also a viewer of those images himself, observing all that struggling with a touch of irony and capable of playing jokes on a mysterious figure. Without imposing his personality on us, he speaks a very personal language. This is evident partly from the title, Hocus Focus. The title and the lithographs are a clear statement in which new insight emerges through a small intervention. Postma associates a new word with meaning; language is living matter. The title is 'a pun'. The traditional magic spell goes 'hocus pocus pilatus pas', where the trick is that something momentarily disappears or appears. It is the sensation of the curtain opening, the story beginning, and the tension of the moment of wonder being felt with a transformative power. The first lithograph further states: "two is infinite 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 at a single point. Through the use of the word 'focus', the emphasis no longer falls on what the mind itself does, but on the subject upon which attention is directed, the 'focal point'. In the rhyming Hocus Focus, Postma changes the meaning slightly (by just one letter) and resolutely to the focal point, the magical moment of wonder of Hocus and Focus in its infinity.

(source: Artzaanstad)