Dennis Hollingsworth

Achillia

Andrew Hahn will be closing his show tomorrow with a performance at the finale. Also opening on Saturday night in Chinatown: Dennis Oppenheimer at Tom Solomon Gallery on Bernard street (divided by the 110 freeway Hill Street exit), and Fran?ois Ghebaly will present Berlin-based artist David Levine.

Here is a kinda-panorama-construction of Andrew's installation of paintings at WPA/LA, and a draft of the introductory text Andrew asked me to write, that didn't pass the mustard in the internal WPA editorial process:

"What are the colors of a crime scene?", this is a question that Andrew Hahn posed to himself in his formative years as an artist. In art, painting and drawing come intertwined. A line is drawn across a surface, a support. A line divides. It creates distinctions. The mind-eye-hand-tool tool plies inflections of touch in a series from the first to the last. It is a summation of actions that come together into a record of what one sees, witnessed either before one's eyes or the imagination or both.

Paint, like blood, pools. It flows and obliterates the distinction drawn by line. One follows the other, changing the terms along the way. A pool meets the edge of another pool, a line is drawn by the boundary. A line can delineate a scene, a mystery, an enigma. Paint scumbles like an eraser, a new surface resets the terms of the drawing, the scene of a crime. A crime is an act perpetrated in a cloud of concealment, an attempted erasure within a civilizational lacunae, an eruption of violence scrubbed to resist forensic analysis. With paint, he "fucks it up to fix it.", in Hahn's words. As he paints, he looks for places to escape the line, for ways to capitalize on materiality, to intensify the thrill.

Am I -the viewer, the perpetrator? A murderer? Hahn's audience is drawn into the mystery, we are connected in the crime. We are implicated into the narrative. The subjects in his work are simultaneously mere playthings and yet more than mere playthings. They are indexes to humanity, they are us ourselves. We are shown the hidden side of human nature and this compels us automaticaalyto identify with it. People always want to take the narrative incrimination and run with it like a purse snatcher. Our glance is turned red handed into a gaze, stopping, arresting us in how we unconsciously, habitually consume information every day. As our gaze lingers, our culpability grows ever more urgent. But the criminal cannot escape... if the police doesn't get us, our conscience will. We are compelled to persist in our fetish of the forensic investigation of a crime scene painted with a hand like Vermeer.

Hitchcock, Serling, Nabokov, Salinger... this, a shortlist of favorite names, those great writers and film directors who have animated Hahn's entrance into art. Similarly, Gerhard Richter had once related his youthful fascination of photographic paper as it emerges from the developer. Imagine if you will, that for Hahn, literature and film become the very form of light struck silver halide emulsion as it is fixed in a bath. This is Hahn's vision of painting. The depths of literature, the movement of film can be allegorized as a motive for his mechanics of painting. Analogs of cinematic reference can be found in his use of scraping, in the blurred line, of filters, of overlay, of montage in juxtaposition, of the movement of film mirrored in his movement of paint.

Hahn's doesn't paint what he likes, he paints what he doesn't understand. This is Warhol's arc as he shifted from the subject of money/fame to death/totalitarianism. Who among us really understands man's inhumanity to man? We tear our social fabric as we grow, we rend the freedom of others as we exercise the boundary of our own. This is the dark side of freedom, the one that robs others of theirs, the violation of the liberal by the libertine. Frailty is built into the ultimate definition of what it means to be human. And as we will never completely understand ourselves, this is the wellspring of art. Andrew Hahn will have much to work with for a lifetime.