Vol. 19 May 2008
Hansen’s complex, multi layered paintings are studied in texture, color, and visual line, but they are also vivid action painting in which the artist’s guest to rest at the moment of the painting. Are for reserved in writhing explosions of color. These expressionist moment in Hansen’s work surge and ride on his polychromatic backgrounds, and see all the more organic juxtaposed against the silhouettes of real-world objects which sometimes run along his bottom of his canvases. This dialogue between representational art and abstract expressionism in just one of the means by which Hansen challenges the notion of the canvas us unified context. He experiments not only with color and shapes, but also with the smooth versus rough, painterly textures of his paint. He sculpts the visual space of the canvas itself.

Hansen was born in Borneo, and he has studied and worked in Indonesia and Taiwan as well as America. His early study was immersed in Indonesian tradition of non-representational art, and Eastern traditions of fine art decoration and Zen ornament have long influenced his work. He both follows and challenges this aesthetic tradition, as his real-world objects-usually artist’s tool, domestic items, or more emotionally laden articles, like syringes-are by no means realistic still-lifes, but more icons floating there in thematic response to the painterly work which dominates the canvas. At times the objects anchor the work, and give the viewer a platform form which to begin a visual exploration. At other times, it’s the exuberance of the more abstract shapes and Hansen’s whips of paint which invite one’s involvement, with the objects as ironic counterpoints to the paintwork rearing up and across the canvas.

Hansen’s work in contemporary abstraction reveals for us the random qualities of painting when it stands in harmony with the aesthetic philosophy behind the work. Multi-layered in intention as well as execution each of Hansen’s paintings presents a complete whole, a universe of its own unique palette.