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ABOUT ARTIST

Kjell Hahn earned a BFA in painting from Truman State University. He then worked for the Japanese government in Himeji, Japan as an English instructor through the Japanese Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program. There he spent a significant portion of his time running art-related extracurricular activities; designing the school logo, a memorial, teaching ceramics and directing an animation. Returning to the USA he moved to Brooklyn, New York and worked closely with art galleries and artists making custom metal installations and sculptures.

In the summer of 2006 he returned to Japan to continue his ceramic training. While working as an apprentice with artist John Dix he has also spent and extensive time traveling by bicycle, visiting ancient kiln sites and artists around the country. To-date Hahn has logged over 10,000 Km in this pursuit.

Kjell Hahn currently lives in the small town of Onishi, two hours north of Tokyo. There he often works with a local painter, Chiaki Horikoshi on collaborations ranging from Flamenco Theater sets, to Anagama kiln firing to films.

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REVIEW OF HAHN'S WORK

The Chasm Between Us All: Kjell Hahn’s Corporeal Paintings

Bodies, contorted or relaxed, shaven heads, strong limbs, gripping postures, and above all those expressiveness faces of opaque eyes populate Kjell Hahn’s canvases. They come to greet us bare in body and spirit, literally and metaphorically. In these paintings we do not find the need to please or and artificial urge to shock. Instead we are faced, faced, with a number of enigmatic faces, sometimes appended to a body, sometimes by themselves, which portray his grim and candid assessment of the human condition.

Each of the paintings presents us with a convoluted but carefully organized group of men that fill the surface in impossible ways. Yet they do not look busy. And that is one of Hahn’s talents, his ability to fill subtle hints and subdue whisperings rather than vociferous exclamations. But they capture our eyes. Occasional bursts of vibrant tones enliven the barren and anonymous background, mists from which these enigmatic beings emerge. A closer inspection reveals hidden layers of color that surface, timidly, in the line of a jawbone, the sinews of a shoulder, and which bespeak the dormant but germinal life. These paintings transcend expressionism precisely because of an expressionistic intensity that lies hidden behind the typically strong yet soft bodies. Bodies that are always male. However, this does not bespeak of male gender bias. Rather, these correspond to the genderless and universal man that terms such as “mankind” originally sough to capture (before more gender inclusive ways found their way into our discourse). Their clonic resemblance attests to this. The figures are born out of a self-imposed need to be truthful to the only somatic reality that Hahn has experiences, and which he feels as genuinely authentic: his own body.

Sometimes the bodies gesticulate and speak to us compensating for the way the obscure faces he depicts hide the person behind them, with the suggestively rich meaningfulness that only a gesture can afford us: immediate, ineffable, yet clear. Sometimes the bodies and limbs just are on the canvas. Comfortable in their nakedness and space they confront us with an unsettling assertiveness that sends us looking for answers in all the wrong places. We look for connections: What are the influences that feed these bodies? Is it Michelangelo? Or is it a Michelangelo that has been perverted by Francis Bacon? Or could it be a de Kooning with a penchant for compositions 1-la-el-Greco? Ultimately, this is irrelevant. A pause establishes the parameters to engage with Hahn’s work: we should not look behind his anonymous characters except as a means to look at the human around and within us.

The represented bodily entities are heavy with repressed though. They condense their emotions and ideas in such a way that we seek to enter their psyches through any appendage, lib feature, even orifice that we see. To no avail. Often our eyes seek the eyes of these creatures. Unsuccessfully. We meet dark, orbital caves without gaze that beckon us to enter them to know the secret world, in a language that is forbidden for us: language of the Other. In Hahn’s Weltanschauung there is always a gap, a rift, between people that is insurmountable. There is a mystery that surrounds the Other and which we strive to breach, hopelessly. When turned upon ourselves we find the same blind stare, looking for an identity that escapes us. If the paintings portray that chasm that stands between you and I, between us all, even ourselves, then Kjell Hahn’s work has succeeded. And there is nothing more human than that.