Dominic van den Boogerd in Metropolis M, issue 6, 1995, p.50 Fons Haagmans Galerie Onrust, Amsterdam November 18 – December 23, 1995 The Dutch term hansworst [buffoon] has been derived from a certain Hans Wurst, the German colleague of Jack Pudding and Jean Potage. Hans Wurst has become a concept. The meaning of this concept is generally known, but its origins have vanished into a dim past. Fons Haagmans (1948), a painter from Maastricht, has rescued Hans Wurst from obscurity. The clown appears on the scene (Hans Wurst, 1994) holding a pointed hat. The painting cannot be called a portrait. It is a figurative image in the most literal sense: it shows a figure, a figure of speech if you will. The other paintings in the exhibition of Haagmans at Galerie Onrust also show figures. They are taken from ancient codes, many now obsolete, in which each figure has a particular meaning. In the masked jester of Ber (1995) we discern Polichinel from the Italian commedian dell’arte, a sixteenth-century form of play-acting in which all of the actors improvise but always carry out a prescribed role. The ashen ‘grim reaper’ cloaked in black and sounding the death knell (Pierre, 1995) has a vaguely familiar look as well. And the man with the donkey’s head in Monsieur Jacques (1995) goes back to the allegorical illustrations in Der Umgekehrte Welt, a book which tells us how the animals have siezed power and, just as in the fables of La Fontaine, have taken the place of people. Haagmans says that he can paint these figures only by ‘cooling them down’, as he puts it. The figures, based on old engravings, are highly stylized. They appear on the canvas not simply through impulse, but are constructed with the aid of stencils.(templates?) Haagmans uses wooden molds, placing these over the canvas and then ‘painting them in’ with permacryl, a kind of water-base house paint. That painting does have a rather impulsive character. Brushstrokes remain distinctly visible, and the paint bleeds through here and there along the edges of the surface. Multiple layers are painted on top of each other, opaquely or transparently, and this gives rise to a lively variation in texture. The colors are subdued – beige, creamy white, dark grey, brown. Only a single detail (a tongue, a scarf) is brightly colored. Due to the use of stencils (templates?) the images assume a graphic, printed quality, comparable to the paintings of Christopher Wools, but at the same time the artist’s ‘handwriting’ gives the work a painterly touch. The paintings of Hans Wurst, Monsieur Jacques and other symbolic figures are alternated with large canvases showing bands of color. The titles, such as In achten gedwarsbalkt and In achten gepaald, have been borrowed from the terminology of heraldry. When a coat of arms consists of bars of color, this always involves an even number of them. Judging from a painting such as In negen rechts geschuinbalkt (1994-1995) – which involves nine of these (?) – Haagmans pays little heed to such rules. And why should he? The man is a painter, not a specialist in blazonry. Heraldic colors such as azure, (keel = geel?) yellow, sable and vert are altered as he sees fit. The big canvases, painted in many layers, have a heavy and massive appearance, as though each one were a wall of paint. These works have also been produced with the aid of (stencils, templates?), and the artist’s distinct handwriting comes across here as well. The combination of heraldic and emblematic paintings can be considered a successful one. Here the two series are united by a single denominator, namely that of the figure. Just as Haagmans took motifs from the magic square, card playing and tarot cards for his earlier paintings, he now uses figures from emblems and heraldry in his recent work. These are figures whose meaning was once understood by everyone; now they lead a dormant existence on the fringes of our collective memory. The buffoon, the jester, the (donkey? ass? numbskull?), the figure of death? grim reaper?), but also the coding of color and form in the coat of arms: they reflect our cultural identity despite our inability to recognize ourselves in them directly. The recent paintings are less restrained in comparison to the previous work of Haagmans. Here the painter grants himself a more liberal use of the southern Dutch idiom - that is to say, from a painterly point of view. Limburg folklore, carnival, Catholicism and the sensitivity to mysticism – all of that comes to the surface in the paintings from the past year. Even literally. The shiny little stones that the painter has glued to Arbre Bifide are usually used for the embellishment of carnival costumes. Frills are no longer taboo, ornamentation has been reinstated and local color enters the limelight. This is not to say that the painting of Haagmans can be called provincial. On the contrary, it joins a rich cultural tradition of sensual exuberance, ranging from gem-studded medieval reliquaries to the paintings of James Ensor. Oddly, however, the figures in the work of Haagmans evoke the memory of that tradition without corresponding to it. The figures appear as ghosts from the past: displaced, lost, turned adrift from the symbolic world in which they were once anchored and where they had specific meaning. From now on they will be forced to do without that familiar context. This is precisely how the artist has portrayed them: as frozen emblems whose legitimacy remains undefined, as painterly reconstructions of shapes that are as familiar to us as the notion hansworst [buffoon] and as alien as Hans Wurst. Dominic van den Boogerd translation: Beth O’Brien