Fons Haagmans
Even in my early period, when I’d just left the academy, I enjoyed making my images look as if they’d been painted by an amateur. Because nothing bothered me more than that academic stance: the sensual, eloquent gesture.
Fons Haagmans via Lost Highway, 2007
Fons Haagmans (1948, The Netherlands) is a painter yet despises oil paint. Furthermore, he avoids a personal painterly touch while aiming for abstraction. Haagmans paints icons, images fixed in our memory. Isolating them and displaying them in an empty field, Haagmans reduces them to their minimal state. Everyone recognizes these images but they have slowly lost their symbolic meaning. Haagmans selects these images for the potentially powerful meaning they carry and peels away all sentimental features until only on the kernel, the memory of their meaning, remains.
