Hannes Postma (1933-2020) - essay in ballistics II

Medium: colours - etching on laid paper
Dating: 1965
Numbered: proof / own work / unique copy
Signed: with a pencil
In very good condition - very beautiful colors
Entitled: "essay in Ballistics II"
loose-leaf - sheet size 58 x 76 cm / image size: 50 x 62 cm



Hannes Postma (Haarlem, 1933 – Amsterdam 2020)

A close examination reveals that what happens to the people in Hannes Postma's drawings isn't very pleasant. At the very least, they are stretched into a kind of bread rolls or compressed into packages of arms and legs. They are constantly in intense turmoil, rising up, floating, or being shot across the plane, colliding, caught in explosions, and divided into strips by sharp-edged surfaces. Their hands and feet let go, multiply, and fly into space. Their heads merge into balloons, which then expand back into bodies further away. They bump into all kinds of cosmic furniture (planks, crates, coat hangers, hats, undulating earth crusts) that makes space unsafe... Naturally, it is no coincidence that Hannes Postma composes with forms that evoke our own world rather than circles and squares. His space is a real space, where the near and far have become interchangeable, an immense space in which the earth appears fragmentarily... The events, the sharp edges, reach us through the drawn flesh. On a visible color stream, wordless balloons drift out of our field of view like smoke clouds or blood drops. The crates contain surprises (not just nice ones; Postma calls them Pandora's boxes), embryos, pieces of landscape and water; perhaps they are also hiding places. Helpless little people hang opposite the cosmic authority of enormous coats and hats, in a world where everything, including themselves, is simultaneously itself and something else, or at least in the process of becoming something else. 'Hannes Postma is a visual artist, someone who, like a magician, conjures up people and spaces. But he is also a viewer of those images, who, with some irony, observes all that flailing and is capable of making jokes with a mysterious twist. Without imposing his personality on us, he speaks a very personal language.' This is also reflected in the title, Hocus Focus. The title and the lithographs are a clear statement in which a new insight emerges through a small intervention. Postma associates a new word meaning; language is living matter. The title is 'a pun.' The traditional magic phrase is 'hocus pocus pilatus pas,' where the trick is that something temporarily disappears or appears. It is the sensation of the curtain opening, the story beginning, and the moment of wonder being felt with a transformative power. Further, on the first lithograph, it states: 'two is infinitely one in focus.' Focus means focal point, or something like mental concentration. However, it is used here as the word 'attention.' Attention is: directing the perceptual ability at one point. By using the word 'focus,' the emphasis shifts from what the mind itself does to the subject of attention—the 'focal point.' In the rhyming Hocus Focus, Postma slightly alters the meaning (by just one letter) and resolutely shifts it to the focal point, the magical moment of wonder of Hocus and Focus in its infinity.