Florian Haller

(…) Florian Haller's paintings take a long time to percept. This makes them totally different from most medial, digital pictures. „ The perception of digital pictures takes place like a contagion, like an affection, a direct contact between the picture and the eye. This makes out its obscenity. The aesthetic distance fails in every way.“ *
Haller sets just this aesthetic distance in an absolute way. His paintings exclusively follow...

(…) Florian Haller's paintings take a long time to percept. This makes them totally different from most medial, digital pictures. „ The perception of digital pictures takes place like a contagion, like an affection, a direct contact between the picture and the eye. This makes out its obscenity. The aesthetic distance fails in every way.“ *
Haller sets just this aesthetic distance in an absolute way. His paintings exclusively follow a pictorial logic and never present itself to our everyday seeing. No everyday pictures are copied in art here. A recognizing view has to fail inevitably. Haller is fully aware of the border between art and reality and knowingly never passes it. This drawing of a border is, in era in which we let us be dulled by the hyper-presence of all of the most horrible (or beautiful) pictures, ever more meaningful. Then the „aesthetic border, existing as a border or as a crossing, can only be crossed into reality at the cost of an artless art... the elimination of the aesthetic border is the elimination of the possibility to speak of reality other than in categories of reality“. **
We should not let us be taken just this possibility.

Jörg van den Berg


* Byung-Chul Han: Die Errettung des Schönen. Frankfurt am Main (Fischer) 2015, p.48 f
** Gottfried Boehm: Zur Dialektik der ästhetischen Grenze: Überlegungen zur gegenwärtigen Ästhetik im Anschluss an Josef Albers. In: Neue Hefte für Philosophie 5 / 1973, p.118-138, here p. 120