PAINTING LIKE THE LASH OF A WHIP
Nothing uplifting, beautiful or delicate. No consoling and reassuring visions. There is no place in Jerry Haenggli's pictorial universe for the transcendental, no room for promises of salvation. One would love to assume the existence of a reassuring counterforce to balance against the fear-inducing. The denunciation and banishment of evil through the power of imagery.
Why on earth did I get so involved with these paintings? There was some temporary hesitation after a first discussion in the artist's studio, but afterwards the images I had experienced would simply not leave me alone. I was well and truly hooked.
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Maybe I was first too bound up with the usual aesthetic expectation of what pictures on a wall actually have as a function: identity-establishing, constructive, serious or even humorous, perhaps sometimes offering small glimpses of eternity. Unexpectedly, I felt the impulse to write and I was teased by the thought of defying my own inner emotional resistance. And of course there was the incontestable power of imagery that casts a spell over the observer who encounters these paintings.
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Jerry Haenggli invents images that remind us of television coverage and pictures in the daily newspapers, images that follow us into our dreams – opaque confrontations with a far-off reality, which we encounter with a natural distrust precisely because they often do not admit clear interpretation. ​​
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This is the territory that Jerry Haenggli moves in. His paintings seek the multiplicity of meaning that demands that our critical understanding operates with perceptual lucidity. His images ask questions about the reasons for suffering and violence, for self-mutilation and for delight in destruction. Disturbing the image of beauty through pictorial intervention means penetrating these dark zones of aggressive behaviour, going under the surface of the pretence of the loveliness of existence.
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The desire to paint banishes aggressiveness. It is an act of substitution and a field of research in an unknown pictorial land, completely divorced from any consideration of what the observer thinks of it. Exposing oneself to possible rejection as a possibility of artistic authenticity, with no angling for acceptance.
This is the path Jerry Haenggli takes, uncompromisingly conscious of the form and the aim to be achieved.
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Excerpt from the the monographic publication:
Jerry Haenggli
Ohne Titel - Zwischenwelten
2010 Kehrer Verlag
Heidelberg - Berlin
Author:
Andreas Meier
*1949, M.A. in Art History and Germanist
1990 – 2002 Founding Director, CentrePasquArt
(Kunsthaus/Centre d’art Pasquart), Biel/Bienne, Switzerland
2003 – 2008 Director, Seedamm Cultural Centre, Pfäffikon, Switzerland
from 2008 freelance author and publicist
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