Simone Haack – Archipel

In many of the artist’s interiors with individual figures or groups of figures, the suggestive staging through lighting effects with hard light and strong drop shadows is virtually picture-determining. The overreal, dramatic lighting expresses a reference to cinema (e.g. to film noir, the psychological thriller, or the horror film).

In numerous of the artist’s paintings, the characters – mostly children and young women in often domestic settings – are illuminated as if by a flashlight. Something has happened or seems imminent. Unmistakably, looks and gestures convey the reliving of upsetting experiences. However, the unexpected and incomprehensible, which has broken into the sphere of the private or intimate, eludes any personification. It remains hidden because the artist abruptly breaks off the narrative structure of the picture – like a film tear. In what her figures experience, experiences become tangible – of power and dominance, powerlessness, rigid constraints or exclusion. Simone Haack’s paintings speak of the fragility of our existence, of vulnerability and isolation.

The artist juxtaposes such often existential situations in everyday life with fantastic sceneries in which the settings are shifted to dream states or to worlds beyond the limits of the possible. Motifs of floating or flying, the lifting of the body’s weight or looking down on the world from above, as well as dreaming oneself into another, better world – into a future in which man experiences primordial experiences in harmony with nature – these are all metaphors that appear again and again in the artist’s paintings and drawings.