Ariel Hassan works with great care and precise control to make objects that explore uncontrolled chaos. His use of hard-edged geometry as well as fluid amorphousness (often combined in the same work) may seem contradictory, but in fact he offers an accurate representation of the nature of things.

Contained within the immense complexity of a living body, a society, a planet or a universe, are individually functioning but connected systems and processes that are themselves highly complex. Each is subject to precise laws and principles (laws of nature, laws of physics, council by-laws, rules of the game). With infinitely proliferating variables, each of them potentially able to affect the others, the scope for unpredictability is endless. Life as we know it is both strictly governed and essentially out of control.

This is the paradox that motivates Hassan’s work as an artist. Everyone has a personal response to the conundrum of infinity, and knows the queasy sensation of confronting the idea that space is infinitely expanding and there is no end to it all. Some cry, some laugh, most are silent. Many turn to religion. Hassan makes art.

He breaks things down to individual components, with the implicit understanding that they could be put back together again differently, recombined into an ever-expanding, evolving and mutating continuum. One link in the chain implies an infinite proliferation. It is beyond the physical resources of an artist to capture the full ramifications of endless expansion, so Hassan tends to go back the other way, exploring smaller and smaller divisions and subdivisions. In either direction, it’s an open-ended process.

His imagery and his approach to making art seem reminiscent of medical science. Crystalline structures and organic processes in nature can be clearly recognised among his points of reference. While there is a definite similarity between his studio methods and experimental studies in a laboratory, he expresses no particular interest in medical research. It is the underlying principle of ebb and flow that gives meaning to his work, not the specific scientific facts.

The HFV project looks and sounds as though it might be based on studies in pathology. In fact the term HVF (Hypothetical Future Value) comes from the vocabulary of financial investment and the stock market. In these works, recognisable portraits are overlaid with free-flowing swirls in a shared black and white tonal scale that allows coherent and incoherent form to blend ambiguously. This occurs more thoroughly in the loop projection of the portraits, when afterimages start to confuse the retina. The possibility of fixed identity is undermined, and certainty is replaced by the prospect of an infinite potential, on which a philosopher, like a share trader, might speculate.

Hassan doesn’t regard what he makes as self-contained objects and images. Instead he discusses them as captured phases of an ongoing progression. Many artists talk this way when describing the relationship between their individual works and the development of their oeuvre as a whole, but Hassan isn’t talking about the steps that comprise his own path. He observes the continuously changing and developing forces of nature and attempts to isolate individual moments for closer study. ‘I can’t make new paintings,’ he says, ‘ I can only find them within chaotic primal exercises and try to emulate them in different technical stages; I can’t formulate sculptures but only try to decipher the system involved and rearrange the pieces.’ He temporarily and artificially suspends perpetual motion and presents a fixed image of flux. All artists do that too, but Hassan is not so much concerned with the thing that’s constantly changing; instead he makes art about the process of change itself.

Two of the works in this exhibition, The Geometry Of Resistance and Last Love Scene, resemble frozen explosions. The structural basis of both of them is derived from blood crystallisation, so the gradual systematic structuring essential to life is presented in such a way that it could also be read as abrupt fragmentation. Hassan’s macrocosmic/microcosmic vision of the universe combines the big bang with the orgasm.

The smallest component of the exhibition A void has been created, a void has to be closed is a fat worm. This automatically brings to mind the concept of worm holes, the shortest direct links within and between universes, travelling through space via time. This idea, so simple as an analogy, so difficult to grasp in reality, is invoked then left for the viewer to worry about. Hassan openly acknowledges the commonplace fact that the more we know, the more we realise we know very little.

His worm is curiously different from the other works. It is a distinct being rather than a configuration of parts, and in a perverse way it’s quite cute. It personifies the abstract process represented in Hassan’s work and gives it a face. Two in fact. Something unknowably and indefinably vast is brought down to a completely accessible level as a kind of logo. It stands for something much greater than itself. The two-faced, double-ended worm could be read as a symbol of endless circularity or a creature that could gobble itself into oblivion. Aside from what it might actually mean, this small sculpture reveals that within the disconcerting portentousness of Hassan’s work there is sometimes a playfully mischievous sense of humour.

Despair may be the most logical response to profound uncertainty, but it is absolutely not Hassan’s response. His anxious awareness of chaos accommodates the competing fragments of structural logic within it, and enthusiastically engages with them. Works of art are able to propose perfect, hypothetical resolutions of unresolved problems. Hassan labours long and hard to achieve this, with impeccable, crystalline models of random progression, and paint surfaces that are slowly and meticulously rendered like a painting-by-numbers version of an abstract expressionist canvas. His painstaking technique as an artist leaves no room for accidents, yet it is used for expressing a belief that the identity of everything depends on its potential not to go according to plan.

Timothy Morrell, 2008

A conversation with Adelaide-based artist, Ariel Hassan, reveals a depth of knowledge and curiosity about our physical existence. Science, philosophy and art influence his thinking about the world and how its parts connect through systems and processes that are highly complex and infinitely changing. The ebb and flow of these systems, and the paradox between their potential for chaos and structure, is of particular interest to the artist.

I first met Ariel in late 2007. We spent a morning talking together about a group of his large-scale paintings and I was particularly drawn to a triptych he had recently completed. Entitled TBMKF/2nd movement [beware the friendly stranger] (2005–07), this commanding, large-scale canvas depicts an organic explosion of pink, black, silver and white. Ariel revealed that in fact the work was an enlarged representation of a paint sample that he had mixed on a sheet of acetate, scanned into his computer and edited before translating it to canvas. In this way, he intended to negate any direct representational reference or subjective response to the work. The painting's surface, however, suggests a number of sources including meteorological charts, biological samples and infrared readings of space. The artist welcomes these possibilities but commits only to a statement that painting can also be likened to the suspension between the representational and the real.

On a second visit with Ariel, I was introduced to a follow-up work that in some ways extends and yet appears diametrically opposed to this earlier painting. BC/Last Love Scene comprises a series of white, floor-based, hard-edge geometric forms that are configured in an undulating format and lit from below by a series of fluorescent tubes. The sculptural components of the work reference the shape of blood crystals and the form they take as they work to coagulate a flow of blood. The work extends the artist's interest in suspension, and more specifically the suspension of fluid. But unlike the TBMFK triptych, which seems to explode all possibilities into oblivion, this sculptural work suggests a sense of growth rather than ending; an appreciation of perpetual motion, random progression and infinite proliferation. Indeed the work appears controlled, almost frozen in time, but there is a suggestion that, as it thaws, its lifeblood will flow again. These works exhibit Ariel's interest in the suspension of time, material and memory; states of flux and the points at which obliteration and creation occur. But the artist does not view these works as parts of a discrete series. His decision to approach his oeuvre in a way that is interrelated yet open-ended is significant as it reflects his broader understanding of the micro and macro, and how all smaller parts play an important role in defining a larger text. Timothy Morrell describes this rationale in a recent catalogue essay:

[Hassan] breaks things down to individual components, with the implicit understanding that they could one day be put back together again differently, recombined into an ever-expanding, evolving and mutating continuum.

The suspended moments captured in Ariel's floor-based installation and triptych direct our attention to the state of the invisible systems around us. They are his way of contemplating the continuously changing and developing forces of the physical world. In viewing these moments of flux we are able to join the artist in considering the overwhelming nature of these systems from a relatively safe place—through art.

Hannah Mathew, 2008

Just what is it that makes Ariel Hassan's paintings so alive, so freshly compelling?

In them, to be certain, one can immediately see the familiar lineaments of the micro/macro cosmos pushed beyond cliche. Hassan's titles suggest imbrication with the up front and physical, with bodily events, perhaps, and their electrical correlations. Yet the artist also talks of aspiring to be a satellite. It is, apparently, no coincidence the pictures could pass, at a first glance, for NASA photographs of earth or Hubble details of gaseous fields, as well as chemical admixtures much closer to hand. Straight away we have polar extremes, the close up and the long shot, combined as if one. The works look like a species of Abstract Expressionism at first glance, while closer inspection reveals a careful hand has been at work--another enriching opposition. The pictures effectively embody indications of chaotic creation and a controlling, dispassionate intelligence.

The artist very consciously deploys this binary as a key part of his modus operandi. The resultant paintings manifest the proposition that the universe can be beautiful, even as they bear the marks of the artist's mediation of that beauty, his necessary participation in the processes concerned. Beauty, we might allow, is not the consequence of an aesthetician's recipe book, or purely an effect of culture, but the result of a particular dynamic between an individual and particular prompts 'out there'. The fullest experiences of beauty invoke precognitive and cognitive levels of understanding working across a register of the inchoately biological to the variously cultural--from the deep, even the dumb, to the 'cool'. All of this one might sense in looking at Hassan's work, adding to the satisfaction it offers.

The work, then, manifests and moves towards synthesising the two principal and opposing attitudes commonly held towards the production and experience of visual imagery. The first one might call the Reception Theory, which has it that beauty (or truth) is objectively exists, and we receive it if our antennae are sensitive enough. Much more fashionable in recent decades is what one might designate the Projection Theory, that the eye of the beholder projects what beauty it finds through the lens of cultural conditioning. The former animates traditional Aboriginal art, Australia's greatest art movement to date, so historical contingency alone might give pause to idly rejecting it - place, we should grant, is not necessarily irrelevant to art and culture (and we might note in passing that Hassan's work is nothing if it is not also a kind of mapping). Beauty theory within analytic philosophy gives contemporary logical support to such perspectives, just as Hassan's prints and sculptures, in focussing on the brain and skull, draw particular attention to the role of mind and body in the production and content of his work.

But back to my initial question. The viewer of Hassan's paintings becomes conscious of the artist watching himself as he scrupulously positions each mark. It is a little like viewing a Cezanne, though the result looks far more like late than early modernism, while invoking a range of contemporary artists, from Gerhard Richter to Glenn Brown, in its ultra-careful reworking of a familiar style. The work suggests what some would regard as an oxymoron, an intelligent abstract expressionism. Here lies much of the pleasure, surely: the joy of myriad forms including unexpected colour shifts and tonal leaps--sudden greens in predominantly pink paintings, for example, and richly dark vacancies in otherwise high key canvases--coupled with the reassurance of high intelligence.

Ian North, 2006

Organic, cosmic, mutated, diseased. It is indiscernible whether the surface imagery Ariel Hassan applies to his shapes and figures in either colour or black and white is scientifically based, digitally manipulated, a form of painterly abstraction, or all or none of the above. At times the imagery appears algal in form; from a different angle it appears gaseous, like the distant surface of another planet. Microscopic, telescopic, marbled or acidic, Hassan's swirls and blotches render the objects and subjects on which they are found, with inimitability. At the same time, this fluid imagery and energy is bound by its consistency of character, reconfigured in each case however, throughout much of Hassan's work on show.

Tensions are rife in 'A Few People Laughed, A Few People Cried, Most People Were Silent', beginning with a sensation of fortuitousness giving way to precision, where Hassan has painted numerous wood surfaces from a broad palette of acrylics. The Geometry Of Resistance (I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a King of infinite space) presents geometric lines and shape that are ultimately opposed by their sinuous in-fill. This artwork also seems to defy gravity as Hassan utilises both three-dimensionality and the processes of installation to produce illusion. The balancing act of many wood panels in Last Love Scene amidst the faint symphony of small, humming fluorescent lights shows the change from simplicity to complexity as one shape is reproduced and huddled en-masse. When faced with the darkness of portrait No. 4 from HFV Project, one cannot help but attempt to visually penetrate the work for depth and clarity, only to find one's own reflection staring back in the end, due in part to the natural lighting of the exhibition space. However, beyond these more formal aspects engendering tension, the broader issues of 'chaos and control', endlessness and finiteness underscore Hassan's work.

Tensions extend too into the physical realm. Viewers of Hassan's exhibition may glean the potential for personal calamity as they duck around falling parallelograms, tiptoe by a sharp life-size modular construction set, dodge the double-headed donut-shaped predator worm and take a wide berth when viewing the quarantined portraits. My advice is mind your step, anything could happen.

Nerina Dunt, 2008

May 2– 28, 2006
www.greenaway.com.au

In Michael Haneke's cryptic 2006 film Hidden (Caché), the opening (deceptively) still shot of a typical Parisian streetscape is exposed as an amateur video film, when the pre-recorded image begins to blur and dissolve on fast-forward mode. It is an inspired opening gambit that Ariel Hassan would term a false truth.

Contradictions are critical to the work of Argentinian-born, multidisciplinary artist Ariel Hassan, whose first solo Australian exhibition Internal Relationships at Adelaide's Greenaway Art Gallery encompassed abstract paintings, sculpture and a series of ten interrelated ink jet prints.

Although the large paintings initially appear to have an affinity with abstract expressionism, closer scrutiny reveals that they have been painstakingly painted with fine feathery brushstrokes. Variously evoking the volatile, swirling mass of a chemical/oil spillage, microscopic views of the body or alternatively satellite views of the earth, such 'fluidity' would seem to represent borderline or transitional states, disruptive of stability. "Internal Relationships" says Hassan in his catalogue essay "is also an internal view of my own physical and emotional states, plumbing the deeper recesses..."

Hassan's elaborate methodology incorporates not only a number of self-imposed restrictions, but also a succession of ruptures, in which his working process is arrested, altered and regenerated. Each stage provokes an assessment – a rational intervention possibly implied by the presence of several skull-like sculptures – as the work effectively 'feeds on itself.' Viewing his role as that of a mediator, Hassan pours paint onto a non-absorbent surface – an action necessarily without a predetermined outcome. Greater aesthetic control is exerted in the second phase of the process when a small section of this (chaotic) mass is isolated, digitally manipulated and the scale vastly exaggerated. Given Hassan's propensity for disruption, it is not at all surprising that he then derails the certainty of the uniqueness of the resulting meticulously- transcribed paintings, by introducing the possibility of multiple digital reproductions, in the form of a series of ink jet prints.

So complicated are Hassan's (unequivocally flat) surfaces, that it is easy to overlook the prevalence of more subtle details (many different shades of a particular hue, for example). The predominantly black, white and silver painting You don't know what I do when I'm alone and you don't want to know is elevated through the unexpected inclusion of a small patch of palest pink in the upper right hand corner. Hassan says he wanted to create work 'without referent' that would be 'fresh and something in itself''. With their genesis in an (orchestrated) act of chance, it is the conceptual complexity, the careful balancing of oppositional elements, which generates the energy embedded in these dynamic works.

Wendy Walker, 2006

Nervousness in Ariel Hassan’s work has specific, literal connotations. He refers to nerves when describing the branched tracery across the surface of his black square and cubic works. This network is like a pattern of dendrons in anatomical tissue. Hassan’s visually and intellectually abstract paintings simultaneously express systems and chaos, order and flux. His sculptures in this exhibition do the same thing within a frame of reference that seems very accessible yet always remains baffling – the nature of life. The nervous system of a complex organism operates in ways that are both predetermined and randomly spontaneous. To most of us this is an infinitely fascinating mystery, an incomprehensibly elaborate series of connections that controls all activity. The only analogy that can be understood in simple terms is the hard wiring of an electrical device, but this is absurdly crude in comparison to the function and complexity of a nervous system. Hassan’s black cubes are designed to be randomly distributed in a display space, so that an entire gallery can be, in effect, wired. He offers this as a somewhat insidious prospect. Just as the glowing magenta skull sculpture Internal Relationships (from north to south) encompasses both life and death, the nerve sculptures simultaneously represent forces that both generate and threaten free will. The interconnectedness of all things, implicit in Hassan’s work, is rather poetic at the philosophical level, yet in today’s world it is an idea that has come to represent the possibility of suffering dire consequences from seemingly unrelated events on the other side of the planet.

Timothy Morrell, 2008

Ariel Hassan is primarily a painter, but his practice extends to sculpture/installation and photography. The title of his latest exhibition Today all your plans are going to be successful! is patently ironic, as the viewer, who is invited to have a great day, will be confronted by demons; the ghosts generated from memory, anger, frustration, fears and phobias temper the greeting. This exhibition is triggered from a more personal perspective than some of the more analytical investigations in his previous shows.

This new exhibition has a degree of theatricality – a shower of meteors about to hit; paintings on hands and feet, prepare to give chase; a colourful and riotous, immersive upper level of the gallery (with a fragmented figure lying on its surface). All elements induce a smile, as everything is held in one suspended moment, like the pause button pressed on a recorder. Moments of transition between not only the obvious binaries of destruction and construction, beauty and decay, the real and the hallucinatory, but a weaving of complex secondary and tertiary issues associated with such polarities. One may smile at the surprise of it all, but the exhibition’s origins owe more to the theatre of the absurd than comedic traditions.

Objects falling from the skies or heavens conjured superstition for thousands of years, spoken of as ‘gifts from the gods’ or bad omens from angry spirits (misunderstanding about meteors lasted until the early nineteenth century). The title of the exhibition (a variation of a line from American poet John Giorno’s Just say no to family values) is also the title of the work Today all your plans are going to be successful! in which visitors are confronted with a shower of meteors as they enter the gallery. Arrested from their high-speed trajectory, a moment before impact, we can appreciate the pure beauty of these celestial objects. The poem deals with fear of the moral majority, the “fundamentalist viruses that threaten to destroy us,” says the poet; in Hassan’s work ‘fear’ is more akin to the thoughts and emotions experienced, not unlike the moment of realisation (too late) that you have dropped an egg. Before it hits the ground you may fear the consequences but simultaneously you can even love its fate. The meteorites may also be read as extensions of the black blobs found in Hassan’s earlier paintings.

From Homer’s Odyssey to contemporary cinema we have been told of ghosts, vapors and poltergeists. Hassan’s non-specific ghosts are his and ours; they are not the ghosts of popular culture, they need not be named; they can taunt, haunt and tease, or we can turn and confront them head on. Ghost 1, 2 & 3 represent the beginning of an anticipated series of seven paintings, each standing (on hands or feet) freely within a space. These large canvases, which are not as they may first appear, should not be dismissed as early forms of ‘abstraction’; fine handwork (through meticulous painting) undermines the initial impression of casual chance generated by random paint mixes. The very loose figurative elements in these paintings were found in the original incidental paintings, sometimes described by the artist as ‘provoked accidental paintings’. 1 This is not a question of the value of labour versus the value of concept, since for Hassan process is part of concept.

Waters are wiser than we is the title of a poem by contemporary Turkish author Fazil Hüsnü Daglarca, and the title of the five resin casts that indicate the consequence between force and inertia, as the vacuum that existed between these objects and their opposing counterparts dissipated. Reminiscent of organic growth or roots or branches, these low relief panels beg tacit questions about the notion of ‘putting down roots’ or ‘looking for your roots’. Linking diverse fields of knowledge in tandem with the artist’s personal aesthetic produces a critical way of thinking, with a by-product that comes close to ‘beauty’, interpreted here in the classical Greek sense. The Koine Greek word for beautiful was, ho¯raios, an adjective that derives from the word, ho¯ra, meaning “hour.” Beauty was thus associated with “being of one’s hour.” A ripe fruit (of its time) was considered beautiful, whereas a person trying to appear more youthful would not be considered
beautiful.

Mathématiques modernes, which brings to mind 1960s concepts of mathematics or the 1970s French new wave band of the same name, exists here as a floor work that interferes with the dynamics of the space it occupies. Islamic design looked at achieving a universal harmony in the repetition of geometric patterns; Hassan interleaves this geometry with his own ‘fluid’ paintings in a surface that threatens to destabilise the ground the viewer stands on. Control and chaos are at play, resulting in simultaneous clarity and obfuscation. This cacophony of rich colours and shapes mellows en masse and provides a platform for Again and again and again, a nearly 300 piece segmented or fractionised reclining figure whose abstracted form is poised motionless and suspended, teetering on the edge of a sudden change, ready to animate or reconstruct itself at any moment, or conversely collapse and even die. This work, which relates formally to the artist’s earlier blood crystal installation Last love scene from a 2008 exhibition, extends however into a more complex system, more reminiscent of a Futurist sculpture than the pixilated computer imagery skillfully handled by Anthony Gormley. Hassan’s units are not stamped out mechanically; each wooden plate is sanded by hand and given several coats of paint individually. The title of the work therefore mocks the act of production.

Hassan is not comfortable with perfectly fitting analysis; titles of works don’t always have a direct relationship to the work itself. The seemingly high finish of the works can mask the rawness that triggered the work initially (all works have a high production value and a rigorous philosophical underpinning). He constantly questions the legitimacy of his expression and practice, concerned that his complex examination of various binaries may synthesise a whole and in turn represent only a reflection of a standardised reality, where Art becomes another aspect of life, as opposed to offering a critique.

Artists may embrace, resist or even try to influence the ever-changing reality; they find themselves in an exponentially growing network of socio-economic globalisation, of increasingly complex cultural exchanges and shifting values marked by the interconnectedness of all things. In this current body of work, rather than reflect, interpret or dissect the state of the world, Ariel Hassan endeavours to capture and highlight a split moment of time, thereby extending time and allowing the audience the space to ponder.

Hassan orchestrates his tableaux from a current concern with fears and phobias – part of the complex web of propositions hinted at by the author/artist.

Paul Greenaway OAM, 2010

1. Small mixtures of paint pigments and water allowed to run together on A4 sized sheets of glass.

Ariel Hassan is an artist concerned with beauty. Ignoring current trends in post-minimalism, he creates works which reach out and communicate with the viewer. Anything but mute, they invite an exchange. Hassan’s work features scientific forms although it is not scientific in character. A key difference is that science pursues answers, whereas Hassan is interested in the unresolved tension of the unanswered question. He embraces and celebrates the unknown.

Today all your plans are going to be successful! is a collection united less by technique or style than ideas and concepts. With these works, Hassan continues his exploration of aspects of personality, character and the inner and outer spaces. He strives to achieve a balance between form and composition where details are vital and chaos is enjoyed.
Hassan spent his childhood in the family’s toy store; he did not just play with the toys around him but enjoyed setting up displays and creating a staged environment. This sense of theatricality and playfulness continues in his work today.

Hassan did not attempt to sculpt the meteorites of Today all your plans are going to be successful! into preconceived shapes; instead he intuitively responded to the material. Perhaps these meteorites have travelled through space, maintaining their form through the earth’s atmosphere and we see them just before the moment of impact. Then, uncertainty, with the possibility of preservation of integrity or complete destruction, thus suggesting a new dawn after cataclysm.

Whilst his canvases are filled with colour and intricate forms, they also subtly, but no less forcefully, feature space. Hassan meticulously creates unstructured canvases, allowing the positives and negatives to engage in dialogue. From random origins, patterns develop which are utilised to create something original. His Ghost paintings feature footprints from the past that follow him during his life long journey. These large scale paintings rest upon limbs, standing comfortably and yet suggesting that if one does not choose to engage with them, they may well initiate the connection.

Waters are wiser than we reflects the artist’s commitment to self nourishment and development. Reminiscent of Islamic carpets, Mathématiques Modernes creates a universal harmony via pattern and information repetition. With Again and again and again, Hassan draws upon moments of transition and the fading of existing systems. This feeds the ‘hüzün’ in him. Orhan Pamuk in his 2005 novel Istanbul describes Hüzün as a feeling of melancholy, angst and a deep spiritual loss but also a hopeful way of looking at life, a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating.

Hassan’s work celebrates life in all its aspects. Uncommonly balanced, death and sadness are acknowledged as vital and welcomed as such. Playing with ideas of scale, magnifying the microscopic, highlighting darkness and organising randomness, Hassan has created a highly personal collection that challenges the viewer vigorously, intellectually and emotionally.

Stephanie Lane, 2010

...

Ariel Hassan’s art is about ambiguity, and about the task of wresting meaning from its clutches.The most fundamental achievement of Hassan’s works is that they constantly achieve this aim with such elegance and grace, despite the seething complexities that lie just beneath their surface.The other key achievement of his work is to do so with a precise timeliness; an acute awareness of the historical period within which his works’ encounters with ambiguity take place. In considering Hassan’s work, ambiguity must therefore always be taken in its temporal sense, contingency.

Hassan is truly an artist of the 21st century. His biography is a picture of globalized nomadism. Growing up in Argentina, he subsequently moved to Spain, where he held his first exhibition in 2003, and then to Australia, where he now lives half the year, living the other half in Berlin, Germany. Hassan works across multiple media: although principally a painter, he produces sculptures, photographs and installations, as well as works that mix all of these. Most significantly, Hassan marks his timeliness by situating himself as an artist, and most particularly as a painter, at the end of a long century of art, and at the beginning of a new century full of possibility. It is importantly from this unstable yet promising point in time that Hassan presents his attempts at meaning. ...

(extract from book, About Madness, GAGProjects, 2011)

Nicholas Croggon, 2011

...

艾瑞爾•哈桑（Ariel Hassan）的藝術是有關曖昧，以及如何從眾多曖昧中獲取意義。哈桑最重要的成就，就是他的作品以高雅、優美的姿態持續完成這些表現，並在那優美的表面下蘊藏著極其騷動的複雜。哈桑另一個重要成就，則是當他的作品與曖昧交會之時，他及時地以他對歷史的精準意識，完成表現曖昧的目的。所以當我們思考哈桑的作品，就必須在曖昧的短暫知覺－也就偶然性中，接受曖昧。

哈桑絕對是一位屬於21世紀的藝術家，他的人生經歷就是一幅全球化社會的縮影。哈桑在阿根廷出生長大，後來移居西班牙，2003年他在西班牙舉辦第一次個展，隨後又來到澳大利亞，現在哈桑一半時間工作居住於此，另一半時間居住於德國柏林。哈桑的創作橫跨多種媒材：他從繪畫出發，也製作雕塑、攝影、裝置、以及綜合這些媒材的作品。最重要的是，哈桑的作品標示出及時的時代感－在上個藝術世紀完結、另一個充滿可能的新世紀開始之時，哈桑把自己視為一個藝術家，特別是一個畫家－哈桑在一切都不能確定、卻又. ...

(從書的摘錄: 關於瘋狂。GAGProjects, 2011)

Nicholas Croggon, 2011

Greenaway Art Gallery, Rundle St
Until 22 April
By David O'Brien

Vincent Van Gogh’s work is not a bad thing to have at mind as you slowly engage the hidden depths of revelatory complexity in Ariel Hassan’s extraordinary exhibition of innately monochrome sculptural, mixed media, sound installation and acrylic on digital print on canvas pieces.
It all seems so simple on an initial quick cruise through Gallery I, Intermediate Space, Mezzanine and Gallery II. Hassan seems to be playing with obvious structural notions of visually realised expressions of the state of being ‘mad’. The mix of chaos, yet rigid order, linguistic disassociation/association expressed in approximate black/white hues are merely the tip of a much deeper understanding. Walking through each Gallery slowly, taking time to investigate the intricate structure of each piece will pay huge dividends.
Close investigation and comparison of acrylic on digital print on canvas works ‘About Madness [Vortex #4] 2011, ‘About Madness’ [Inexhaustible-Enraged-Happy-Time-Delusion] 2012, ‘Triangle’ 2011, collage of 16 digital prints on rag paper, ‘Rectangle’ 2011 collage of 22 digital prints on rag paper, and the series of light box works comprising ‘We Were Faster Than Life-Oh How We Laughed-This Was All The Life On Earth’ 2010-2011 brings to the fore quite startlingly, a depth of impressionistic technique, married to a highly post modern outlook.
What do I mean? Specific aspects of each work reflect through every single piece in the exhibition. It’s as if the ‘ordered’ aspects of one work contributes structurally to the ‘disorder’ of another, even if confined to strict geometric framing or structure.
Get up close to works such as ‘About Madness’ [Vortex #4] and the true, impressionistic; three dimensional natures of Hassan’s works take grip. For beneath the grey swirls, overlayed by counter clockwise slashing black swirls, squares of grey are light triangles of off white, all over laid with text when it comes to ‘About Madness’ [Inexhaustible-Enraged-Happy-Time-Delusion] 2012. Think of the intricate structure of Van Gogh’s most seminal works. The edginess, intensity of expression offered of the natural world, mediated by a highly strung mind.
Hassan’s pieces offer something abstracted alike to Van Gogh’s approach simultaneously hard, profoundly deep, soft and majestic. The light box works, which fade in and out, offer a sense of the mind itself in action, in frenzied introspection, expression. They are soft images. You could call them brain scans. You find their imprint in the other pieces. In effect, using light, hard traditional forms, conventional framing, ‘unconventional’ collage technique, Hassan offers a profoundly beautiful sense not of madness, but the transcendent otherness/process we call creativity. ‘About Madness’ is an exhibition about seeing and expressing the power of reality from within. This was Van Gogh’s achievement in relation to the world around him. It’s Hassan’s achievement in relation to giving specific expression to the world within.

www.dbmagazine.com.au

Immersed in a process that is both conceptual and material, Ariel Hassan has at the core of his work a simple procedure – a small quantity of different coloured paints are poured and allowed to run together on small panes of glass. In a vivid demonstration of the beauty of fluid mechanics, the different colours remain intact to a certain degree, and swirl around each other creating unpredictable patterns on both the macroscopic and microscopic level. Hassan later scans selected areas of these abstract images and manipulates the colour and composition in a computer. A print is produced which he painstakingly copies onto a large canvas with paint and brush. This hand-made painting is a crucial stage since it not only results in unexpected details and divergences from the print but also adds a human texture and an aura of authenticity, even mystery.

These paintings of Hassan are compelling images of flow­, yet of a flow that did not literally take place on the surface of the canvas. Despite appearances, these works are representations of the images of flow. As well as their sheer beauty, it was this paradox that prompted me to write about them.

The suggestion that painting abstractions needs nothing more to say beyond the painting itself, not decided by title or explanation, is not a sentiment Hassan shares. Firstly he has titles; often obscure and elaborate. Moreover, his paintings are not content to rest on the wall; they can warp and twist into 3-dimensional space. In some instances, they literally sprout feet and step off the wall altogether to inhabit the viewer’s space ­– this is both macabre and humorous. They can morph into tessellated patterns on the floor that one walks on, or form wallpaper on some adjacent wall. The patterned floor can become a surface on which to place sculptures (modular, complex and intriguing in their own right); meteor-like objects can rain down from above in some installations and in others mirrored light boxes can appear on the walls. Thus, in Hassan’s exhibitions, the paintings themselves can become almost incidental to the total installation, yet painting itself remains at its core. I am reminded of the poet Novalis who once declared: “Every individual is the centre of a system of emanation”

Critical theory, research, and reading are important to Hassan. In a recent discussion he mentioned the writings of Deleuze and Guattari’s celebrated book ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, which pursues the philosophy of difference; the ‘nomad line of thought’, the ‘anti-hierarchical’.  ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ was one of the foundation stones for the emergence of post-modernism. While no longer an ‘issue’ or a ‘hot topic’ in the visual arts, I believe that its influence was profound, was widely absorbed and internalised, such that it underpins much of contemporary art practice today. Brian Massumi, the translator of ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ writes in his introduction that Deleuze and Guattari were keen to contrast their “nomadic thought” to the representational thinking characteristic of western metaphysics since Plato, which they refer to in a derogatory tone as “state philosophy”. He writes: “Nomad thought does not immerse itself in the edifice of an ordered interiority: it moves freely in an element of exteriority. It does not repose on identity: it rides difference. It does not respect the artificial division between the three domains of representation: subject, concept and being; it replaces restrictive analogy with a conductivity that knows no bounds”.

Despite occasional intrusions of figuration, it nevertheless seems apt to characterize Hassan’s work as ‘abstract’. Thus he is perhaps part of that strand of contemporary painting which Tony Godfrey, the author of the 2009 publication ‘Painting Today’, calls ”ambiguous abstraction”. Interestingly, Godfrey points out that no other area in painting has developed such a complex and theoretical literature as abstraction. He points out that many looked to the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, “for whom the key metaphor was the rhizome, a plant that grows not from a seed but from elements of itself, constantly spreading across the ground and re-rooting themselves”. Furthermore, he explains that “in a world where the hierarchy descending from God has disappeared, such a network, with its almost infinite numbers of routes, is another way of explaining how the world and the human neural system works”.

When we talk about the ‘human neural system’ we are simultaneously talking about the structure, which produces consciousness. As Douglas Hofstadter asks in his book ‘I am a strange Loop’: “ can a self, a soul, a consciousness, an ‘I’ arise out of mere matter? If it cannot, then how can you or I be here? If it can, then how can we understand this baffling emergence?”. These are still existential questions today, questions that I feel Hassan, on the evidence of his work, might also find compelling. Art can be a means of exploring self  and the mind. The making of art is an evolving process: I am ‘I’ who is becoming ‘I’ who is not I.                             

Imants Tillers, August 2011.

本文來源於《HI藝術》2011/12期
文：吳亞男
攝影：董林

由亦安畫廊及Greenway Art畫廊聯合舉辦的《關於瘋狂》是講述一位活在矛盾年代的藝術家的一段瘋狂故事。 “因為人類的狀態是曖昧的，而曖昧是人類所尋找的，經過失敗與無恥，人類才得以挽救他的生存”。艾瑞爾·哈桑（Ariel Hassan）優美的作品表面下隱藏著騷動的複雜，人必須失去一切才能變的單純，這就是為什麼人們會選擇成為複雜。

混種體
哈桑是一個生活在矛盾年代的混種體。土耳其裔的他在阿根廷出生長大，後來移居西班牙，隨後又來到澳大利亞，目前哈桑一半時間工作居住於此，另一半時間居住在柏林。軀體的地理轉換成為某種訊息交流與溝通的轉譯站，全球化的影響，每個社會都混雜了其他文化的形態，藉由人的流動及交流，不斷地散佈新的文化基因，蔓延全球。除去地理上的轉換，我們每個人也都是混種體，被當今社會里科學、政治、經濟、藝術、文化等元素裡的多重交疊關係，每種元素的界線越來越模糊，身份的認同也顯得更曖昧不清。

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