He has taken the world in moments.

He has taken them and meticulously cut them from their frames, pasted them into new positions with his brushes and his pastels.

The note which accompanies these fragments - if fragments they can be called, for each is complete on its own - it is brief. By your request and command, so the note says, these works have been delivered.

Hansl's portfolio...

A girl in blue and orange skips rope in the shade of a a building, her pigtails in mid-air as her feet prepare to land resoundingly against the pavement. Her younger sister is on hands and knees not far off, half in sunlight. She creates a world in chalk, unseen by any other eyes. Under her hands in childish crude scrawl fish swim, tortoises crawl, dolphins dive. Her palm is wet and streaked with chalk, as if she's erased and started again, or as if she's somehow reached for one moment into her new world. And the old world goes on behind both children, stone buildings and metal automobiles caught in the sunlight.

Two young men, boys, really, dance in a club. The lights are vivid, streaking across bared chests in grand swaths of colour. They are almost mouth to mouth, a lover's hip curved in towards the other body. One hand is thrown back, curled partially shut, waved in lazy abandon as music moves over them. There is the vague definition of other figures, other bodies - but the others are meaningless. It is a private moment made public. The pucker of one's lips in invitation borders on the obscene, but never quite makes it past sweetness.

Two men, a little older, clad in rough workmen's clothing stagger against one another in a dockside bar. Their posture is the same as the two boys in the previous painting, but their intent is entirely different. The hip curved in is aggressive, meant to block the other's movement; the upraised hand closed tightly into a fist. The pucker of lips is caught in mid-obscenity; blood flows from under his eye, from the other's nose and muddied around his mouth. Their boots catch at the floor's sawdust and spilled wine and fish scales in the corners.

Men in business clothes stand in a slaughterhouse, examining a prize steer while fastidiously keeping their trouser cuffs out of the blood and offal. Slightly behind and to one side of them, a man in working clothes draws a sharp knife against a whetstone, examining the edge as he does so. The colours are somber, muted, slightly washed out. One of the businessman has blood on his fingers where he rests his hand on another businessman's back, just between the shoulderblades. His expression is devoid of malice or sly intent; the blank cipher of 'just business'.

Weight. There is that to it; something of Time gone by, met with a sharpness that has become worn gradually and by degrees down to Patience. There is a share of humour, and there is something knowing there, caught in indigo. Olive skin reflects ochre in the surface of golden brandy, held in a languid hand. The shirt is expensive - as everything about the painting seems to be. It is open to the waist, revealing the caressing curve of musculature, inviting the eye to follow until it is blocked by the edge of a table.

The furnishings are like the figure - dark, masculine, with the blanched white of the shirt to lighten it, the coruscant glitter of light breaking and diffusing against the rim of the goblet loosely held, against his face. It deepens the effect of those eyes - those eyes. The expression is patient - knowing - waiting, yet complete. There is nothing missing. There is a subtle touch of red at one sleeve-cuff if one looks particularly closely; just a droplet. Spilled wine, smudged lipstick, forgotten blood, it is unidentifiable in its miniscule size, detectable only by the closest scrutiny.

There is enigma faced in pride, a sly humour which has come at cost - time having instilled it with its knocks. The dark hair is as rumpled as if fingers have run through it, or the wind alone. But there is something to the set of the head, the chin, that invites one to believe the worst. The glint of the devil, generosity tainted by other people's eyed suspicions. The dust that collects on the wood in corners is gold, the shadows purple for royalty, and for all that relaxed nonchalance, there is steel in the spine on display...

Posted by Maire at October 15, 2005 08:49 PM