Today all your plans are going to be successful!

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

A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people where silent.

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

Artists Statement > Internal Relationships, 2006

Internal Relationships connects two stages of development in my work: Electronic Fluids (2001 - 2003) and its continuation TBMKF (The blood must keep flowing), a project that started in 2004 and is still in progress.

The title of the exhibition refers to the interconnectedness of disparate systems, momentarily acknowledged and then released as quickly as they appear. The process of painting itself acts as a flux, a sometimes mediator between the real and the abstract, compounding ideas and concepts that traditionally are not seen solely as binaries or as compatible elements, interleafing in a nonlinear order to mimic this complexity.

Painting acts as the provocateur within a process that aims to maintain the chaos inherit in the systems observed, while accepting that 'selection' must take place within each step along the way. Self imposed rules or conditions act as a framework that allows chaos and restricts convention simultaneously, condensing the immensity of these broad notions into a concentrated essence.

IR is also an internal view of my own physical and emotion states, plumbing the deeper recesses, and re-evaluating myself in order to systematize the irrational to enable progress. TBMKF is a more directly visceral approach, the use of anatomical imagery, (albeit inconsistent with my stance against didacticism), makes evident the restrictions of a particular system and becomes a reflection of self, through dissection and observation.

Hassan-A, April 2006

Subjective Satellite by Ian North, 2006

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