The graphic work of Rudolf Haas, which develops since the years 1980 went trough many stages. In the series of the “splitted letters”, showing a huge amount of letters accumulated, mixed up, sometimes combined with numbers, they are covering the sheet of paper, in ascendant free movements, inscribed sometimes in a partially defined field. Various elements the way upside down, with ink or pencil circled legs, are dancing in multiple sonorities. Here and there one can decipher a word, identify a portion of sentence emerging from the profoundness of the work. Some letters, in connection with the name of the artist are also recognizable, like “R”, “H”,”A”, “S”, a kind of affirmation of his deep self.
Rudolf Haas is also realising “fragmented” drawings, with ink and Chine ink. Composed with geometric forms, squares or rectangles, they structure the sheet of paper with vertical and horizontal hand traced lines. Like a checker-board or a chess game, with sometimes shadowed zones, hatchings, letters, enhanced with some touches of colours or signs on coloured surface, they compose an original series with a surprising expressive power.
Some of the works are leafs of miniature note-books, which until today have been kept secret by the artist. They are a true revelation of a whole part of Rudolf Haas’s work. With pastel, ink, charcoal, pencil, painting, the more recent ones, covering the period from 2010 to 2013, are a succession of various motives like portraits, self portraits with furtive lines, almost erased, recalling perhaps the difficult years’ troubles.
Games with the present and the absent, the hope and the disarray, the spiritual and the transcendent, the traces of these drawings interlace and confound in a kind of exalted beauty and liberty. A mysterious power come out of these tiny little works which, despite their size, are properly monumental in their realisation and signification. Among them figure some real masterpieces, I would qualify as “monumental”, an expression borrowed from Picasso when he saw for the first time the tiny sculptures of Giacometti…
Rudolf Haas, born in Vienna in 1937, self made artist, lives and works in the Lemanic area. He exhibits regularly around the world since 1976. A marvellous publication entitled Rudolf Haas, Zeichnungen, Dessins, Drawings 1947-2013, (470 pages), published by Editore Libreria Bocca, Milano, Italy, 2014, is available at the gallery at the price of Frs. 85.--.
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