EBERHARD HAVEKOST - Retrospektive 2

The moon is the perfect object: unpopulated, dead, cold, silent, dense, and distant. The Earth is the perfect subject: full of life in different guises, active, with human life forms in particular eagerly engaged in exploring, examining,understanding the material world.

Havekost’s work points to the lacunae and failures of the Enlightenment tradition of scientific exploration and observation. Distances and differences between us and the world open and close in Havekost’s painting.

Photography has often been seen as a dematerializing force, creating a distant, and even false, world of images; in line with this, critics have read Havekost’s work as a kind of essay on the unavailability of reality today. (...) This work is more complicated than that. Over the past several years, Havekost has been making paintings that offer a series of proposals about the nature of the material world and our relationship to it that are nusual in their sophistication and in the physical, rather than purely discursive, nature of that sophistication.

One enormous strength of Havekost’s working process is that it multiplies rather than organizes, to show the constantly shifting affinities between things, images, experiences, paintings. There is an intertwining of things which we intuit as related, converging if only at different moments, transgressing the usual, more fixed ways of understanding.

Perhaps this is a way of being in the world that does not presume the viewpoint to be entirely that of the human subject. These paintings allow a kind of fullness to objects (including images and paintings), as simply particular objects, rather than opposing or betraying objects.

From Katy Siegel “And the Moon came nearer”, catalogue „Titel“ Eberhard Havekost, 2013