Hannes Postma (1933-2020) - la generation retrouvee II

Medium: mixed technique (pencil, watercolor, ink)
Dating: 1957
Signed: in ink
Condition: In good condition
Titled: "la generation retrouvee II"
loose-leaf - page size 50 x 65 cm


Hannes Postma (Haarlem, 1933 - Amsterdam 2020)

"From close up it isn’t so nice what the people in Hannes Postma’s drawings experience. At least they are stretched into a kind of rolls, or compressed into bundles of arms and legs. They are always in violent agitation, rise up, hover or are shot across the plane, collide, get tangled in explosions and are divided into strips by planes with sharp edges. Their hands and feet loosen, multiply and fly into space. Their heads merge into balloons, which a little further again become bodies. They collide with all kinds of cosmic furniture (planks, crates, coat hangers, hats, wrinkled earth — crusts) that make space unsafe... Of course it is not without meaning that Hannes Postma composes with shapes that evoke our own world rather than circles and squares. His space is a true space, even though near and far have become interchangeable, an immense space in which the earth appears fragmentarily... The events, the sharp edges affect us through the drawn flesh. On a visible color stream, wordless balloons drift out of our field of vision like smoke clouds or drops of blood. In the crates there are surprises (and not only nice ones; Postma calls them Pandora’s boxes), embryos, pieces of landscape and water; perhaps they are also hideouts. Helpless little people hang opposite the cosmic authority of enormous coats and hats, in a world where everything, including themselves, is at once itself and something else or at least is about to become something else." "Hannes Postma is an image-maker, someone who, like a magician, conjures people and spaces. But he is also a viewer of those images, who with a certain irony observes all that fidgeting and is capable of making jokes with a mysterious vibe. Without forcing his personality upon us, he speaks a very personal language." This is partly evident from the title, Hocus Focus. The title and the lithographs are a clear statement in which a new insight arises through a small intervention. Postma associates a new word meaning; language is living matter. The title is 'a pun'. The traditional magic spell reads 'hocus pocus pilatus pas', where the trick is that something briefly disappears or appears. It is the sensation of the curtain opening, the story beginning, and the tension of the moment of wonder with a transformative power felt. On the first lithograph it further states: "two is infinite one in focus". Focus means focal point or something like mental concentration. It is, however, used as the word 'attention'. Attention is: the directing of the perceptual faculty to one point. Through the use of the word 'focus' the emphasis no longer lies on what the mind itself does, but on the subject toward which attention is directed, the 'focal point'. In the rhyming Hocus Focus Postma shifts the meaning slightly (by only one letter) and resolutely toward the focal point, the magical moment of wonder of Hocus and Focus in his infinity.