The oeuvres

In the centre of Hanke’s works stands a fragmented world, born and held together by contradictions and incompatibilities, a living world and in effect a solitary one inside people’s heads. Wile remaining true to the realism of his early years in terms of content, he now crystallises his thoughts in numbers. For him the number is a mirror of what the world effectively is: on the one hand it stands for a society entirely oriented to science and business that lays claim to universal validity and controllability; on the other hand, via symbolic contents that are valid across all cultures, at the same time it represents the fears and hopes of people.

This is the concept from which Hanke’s works draw their life. As ostensibly clear and transparently structured constructions, they are pictorial reflections concerning the world we live in. And each oeuvre may carry the comment of the artist: “Well, you know, it is just like in real life. It may happen to anyone that …” This is followed by a brief analysis of the pictorial means used, the rules behind the composition shine out, parallels are hinted at with regard to the everyday situations in which similar means are applied, and one viewer or another may recall: “Not long ago I also had two numbers the wrong way round in my account number and the result was that…” The influence of numbers on our normal everyday life becomes clear, in its rules, in its complex ways of thinking. A result of his interest in philosophy and psychology?

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Can the sun be square?

Children’s television, advertising, TV news. Pictures on every corner: Radiating seriousness, shrilly demanding attention – familiar things provide information, surprising combinations tug at your attention. The age of the comic. The packaging that also screams its message from the shelf to the hastily passing shopper. Demanding action. The logo links itself with meaning in exactly the same self-evident manner as road signs, in the blink of an eye, in passing, out of the corner of the eye. No more than random shape-colour interplays? Systematically placed, reduced to the limit, manipulated in order to manipulate! A square sun, quite a hit.

Are you aware that each of us must be accounted a genius, only because we recognise a sun at all – where after all it is only a circle, in all possible colours? Now that really does go without saying! Only because recognition is the prerequisite for our survival? The leg of the centipede? Not quite so! After all, our perception is the root of our picture of the world, for our thinking at all, for how we act. Wars have already been started only because something was wrongly perceived, reference points mixed up, the viewpoint shifted, people following their own interests. And the more reduced is that which is perceived, the more easily does the unforeseen emerge from purposefulness, nonsense lodges itself in rationality, unambiguity is lost in interpretations, stringency follows winding paths, nuances dissipate clarity. On closer crutiny, the signs reveal themselves as patterns, like chimaeras they point towards heterogeneity.

The insight that Wittgenstein noted in his diary on 17.10.14 has meanwhile become a cliché: “Yes, it would be possible to describe the world entirely by means of completely general sentences without any name and without using any other designating tokens. And to reduce this to common speech, you only need to introduce names etc. in following “($x)” by saying “and this x is A” etc. In other words, you can draw a picture of the world without saying what represents what. For the picture and the mode of representation are completely outside of what it being represented!” In principle, everything can be allotted any desired meaning. The bridge between the world of the things around us and what we recognise and use, our perception and our consciousness, is obviously not a static mass that assigns meaning to what has been perceived in a ratio of one to one. In a virtual world, everything is possible. A square sun is equally acceptable and excites no comment. I myself am already active through the fact of seeing, I demarcate, isolate, compare, categorise. Not only visually. By recognising, I have already assigned the object of my gaze to an overall context that already exists in me. If I say: “This is a circle”, it is only a circle if I know that this shape is known by this name in different contexts, insofar as I have learnt it. At the same time complete freedom exists as regards what thoughts I associate, what nets I cast out, whether my catch includes inconsistencies. In the end it is my own experiences that steer me, perhaps completely off the track, but certainly in a manner unique to me. Bad memories run counter to good intentions. Perhaps it is only the lighting that is wrong. Or I am simply out of sorts. By designating, I am at pains to live my life. Anew each time, without thinking about it. Manipulated manipulating. In the light of everything else, what I see is open to new interpretations, not only variant forms. The mirror of a “correct” view of the world is inevitably shattered in the kaleidoscope of individual views of ourselves, each for itself equally valid. It is this area in which rationally calculated suggestion and emotional re-interpretation, illusory objectivity and subjective deception can set traps for each other that fascinates me. In this context I start from a picture of the world in which I pursue the process of reduction and manipulation of a prescribed world of signs as far as possible through to the end in order to to be able to replace every “name” more easily by a “($x)” according to Wittgenstein. It is the border area in which shape and colour gain a new quality, meaning, the area that is still free for new allocations because it is only just beginning to stimulate our perception, the area in which apparently objectively prescribed meaning and subjective interpretation have been not yet been pressed into firm relationships, the area in which also a triangle can be a sun – or something completely different.

In the centre of my work thus stands a world in the head, made up of morsels balanced with a world around us, captured through brilliantly imperfect tools, just good enough to find your way around. On a swaying floor, what is apparently absurd must be brought into harmony in a gigantic mosaic. A pieced together picture of a world, a co-existence that is put together again anew each time and is only conceivable in contrasts. Fortunately they are always reverse sides of a coin. I cannot see the one without thinking of the other: not the mass without the individual, rationality supplements itself by emotionality, if something appears to me to only be a foreground then it must have a background. It is only the unity of the differences that forms the whole, which however in its many-layered intricacy is always only partially recognisable: the stencilled writing is confronted by the scriptural gesture; always the same computer printout is overlaid by individual signs in a series of works; the picture and the image correspond with the cuts in the acrylic glass, and the reflexes on the wall only come into being through the light, depend on the viewpoint of the beholder, change with the lighting.

Through my naming what I have seen, the latter unlocks itself for intellectual access. Vague experience becomes present. Outward appearance can be read directly. Something does not only appear as a foreground and background but is at the same time also intended as a foreground and background. A shape does not only look erased or damaged, clearly outlined or free ‑ it is also be understood as such. The same applies in the case of the media used: the computer printout is not only an up-to-date medium, it also represents my time – by making eye-catching characteristics readable, in terms of content and formal, subjective and social, characteristics of the composition and expression, of the way of thinking and of the mentality. By looking closely and thinking about what something is and how it was made, I create the basis for understanding, which I add from within myself, from my own store of experience, a common good only in parts. By becoming conscious of the perception process, by actively seeing, by becoming aware of myself, I begin to use the information that rolls over me every day in a new way.

The number became the key: to my time and to my work. Not only that it stands for the quintessence of rational exploration and economics and represents the life nerve of a whole epoch. It simply manages information. In it is crystallised man’s dream of omnipotence, of mastery of the laws of nature, the foreordainment of the future. However as self-deception, an illusion. In humility we bow before the findings of the natural sciences, and first and foremost those of mathematics. No criticism is ventured, unless it comes from out of their own ranks. After all, the findings are too complex and incomprehensible. And who wishes to be exposed as an ignoramus. Our experience with numbers at school was not always the best. So we dumbly see and thankfully receive the blessings of technology, and offer no resistance when at every turn we degenerate to numbers. And yet hardly anybody still has a clear overview of the exigencies of everyday life and of the picture of the world that has meanwhile been hollowed out from the inside and offers no assistance in overcoming all the everyday frustrations and feelings of inferiority. Escape into an irrational understanding of predestination becomes easier: tarot, kabbala, the mystique of numbers. They promise, in the number, warming springs: imagination, faith, significance. Inner fulfilment. And the number itself liberates from the corset that it itself created. Also only a fata morgana. By seeing one, both come towards me: The flights on high and the powerlessness of human thinking and feeling.

Even if one or other of these insights may appear to us to be all too pregnant with meaning, these contents of the number have nevertheless penetrated into our attitudes to the world. This starts with common sayings such as for example: “All good things come in threes.” And does not necessarily stop with hotels that do not have a room number 13. Born from the need to measure and assess everything, it also determines the inclination of people to want to explain everything and through speculation on the basis of analogous conclusions to also uncover things that are inexplicable, interculturally in beautiful harmony; our life, ratio and feeling, both manifestly and subliminally. In this context, number, metaphor and allegory, content and outward appearance go hand in hand; after all it is exactly from the very frequent pictorial character that the significance of the number derives its greatest strength. In many guises it presents itself to us, dominates us, offers itself as a help: the vertical strokes on paper for counting and the bar code; dynamically it radiates optimism from the billboard, concealed it documents resignation in the prison cell; demanding objectivity, scribbled down full of fear - communicating from within and beyond itself.

And this indicates the true strength of the picture. By approaching us in all its and our many-facetted intricacy, the “significance” of a visual impression can neither be conceptually imitated nor constructed nor fixed and the visual happening of a picture can correspondingly not be reduced to manifest meanings. On the contrary it offers room in which what is seen is filled with a life of its own. Behind what is manifest there appears to me to exist a further level that reflects my life and my world, yielding to my inclination to constantly progress from the explicable to the inexplicable, to speculate and in speculating to find myself in my possibilities and limitations. To look for a depth that is only to be found in me. Fundamental laws on which seeing is based make it possible to indicate new aspects and allusions, to form sense units, to permit these to become plausible and comprehensible, to question familiar relationship structures. To change and to widen the picture; the picture as a mirror simultaneously for both and of both: world and consciousness, real and unreal, explicable and inexplicable - statically presented and at the same time changing on each new encounter.

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