Hans Aichinger

Hans Aichinger’s works are filled with concentration: on the one hand, the concentration he applies in painting his highly precise figures, and even more so, the mental tension that the figures themselves convey through their moments of pause. This concentration does not reveal its object as it lies outside of the frame - without reference - in the open. In doing so, Aichinger creates a balance between figuration and abstraction, and positions the legibility of his images somewhere between possible and impossible.
The figures are role-players on a minimalist stage, not portraits—they are predominantly soloists without concrete counterparts, but rather engaged with counter-objects or resistances: a wooden stick, taxidermy animals, pebbles, toys, or, even more reduced, with a physical gesture—as an expression of internal compression. And they are mostly adolescents, still on the path to accepting their own appearance, marked by naïve self-assurance and openness to whatever comes next. Background and space remain curiously undefined and silent. On medium-sized canvases, the figures appear nearly life-sized, almost at eye level with the viewer.
The ambiguity of titles like "Abnehmendes Licht" (Diminishing Light) or "Unruhe" (Restlessness) holds both a concrete and an indefinite aspect; this is where the works begin to assert their peculiar abstraction. The openness—the unforeseeable "taking shape"—of the protagonists on the one hand, but above all of the image’s content, is simultaneously representational and abstract. This suspicion is reinforced by Aichinger’s meticulous attention to detail, which surpasses any realism and begins to dissolve form. These detail-obsessed, almost microscopically alienating elements carry no superficial meaning, yet they guide perception. In this roundabout way, abstraction finds its way into the work. Aichinger comes surprisingly close to his inclination toward the non-objective, the purely conceptual image—though from an unexpected direction.