hsien panel 4

NicholasHauser

Background

Born in Blackpool England, 1958. 
Lives and works in Johannesburg and Kampala, Uganda.

Hauser seems still to believe in the fundamental importance of marks and shapes. The recent Hsien panels support this view by paring line and colour down to the basics of white on black.

In essence, they are improvised essays or treatises that unintentionally postulate an apparent unified need embedded into every civilization in every epoch, that manifests in the making of timeless, delirious forms. Whether these impulses are incontrovertibly inherent in human DNA or are caused by our position in the cosmos, is a matter for speculation.

By abandoning literal narrative and story telling pictorially, Hauser shows that the human pre-occupation with the business of being and meaning, leaves behind physical evidence across a massive variety of mediums and cultures. The Hsien panels are merely a homogeneous variation of this phenomenon.

It is tempting to view them as anagrams, a sacred alphabet or set of celestial designs with purpose and intent. For the artist, it is enough that the panels provoke a response from individuals in trying to file them intellectually, or simply use them as a temporary escape from what is.

Says Nicholas: "There is very little we can do to justify our existence. Art is perhaps one. Even the orbiting of planets trace a pattern and leave behind evidence that they were in motion."

"It astounds me that temporarily animated accumulations of particles - dust if you will - like us, can articulate anything."