by Johannes Birringer

Hans Staartjes is a photographer whose work I never quite knew very well, except that I met him in the theatre, in the late 80's, and we have exchanged notes over the years. He knows my dance work and has photographed it, trying to shoot the movement without documenting the dance. I knew his interest in sculpture and three-dimensional form, but I always considered him a purist who insisted on the quality of the prints he made and on pushing the photographic medium further towards the non-objective and the non-expressive. If there is a modernist equivalent to pure dance in photography, I imagine it to be such striving towards simplicity: how can one make a non-referential photograph, evacuated of any literal meaning yet still remaining a photograph, complex and radiant?

Now I know his exquisite and careful explorations of the tactile textures of shapes that could be flesh, bodily extremities or fantasized internal physiognomies or anything else one might project onto these two-dimensional images. I approach them as a dancer, which means I don't pretend to be able to describe them literally, nor claim to have found a conceptual or metaphorical language that could contain their evocative power of abstraction. I will drift through them. New Emotional Landscapes ... is a revelation, and the impact of the exhibition for me lies in its subtle internal contradictions. The photographs are surfaces that are immensely porous; they intimate objects but don't disclose their nature and the space in which the light pours through them. Intended to remain untitled, Staartjes has now inscribed them with allusions to geographical, geological or psychological layers, layers of the imagination that are states of being and becoming, in flux, frozen and yet pulsating with intimations like the cooler wind that arrives with the evening.

Like the pigmentation of skin, changing with age or exposure to light/sun, the textures resonate with deeper implications. The human body, its fleshliness, vertebrae, cavities, protrusions, ligaments, inner organs, and, above all, its skin membrane, is hinted at, but the work encourages the mixing of metaphors, and spinous process can look like cervical ripples of a hill or like a cranial wave breaking against the moist sand and pebbles of a lunar beach. Staartjes holds back deliberately, as if wanting to avoid any literal reference to concrete physical body shape or, worse, to fashionable contemporary obsessions with body politics and sexualities, the obscene or abject body, or other themes of cultural transformation often suggested by current work in morphing and digital manipulation. His artistic achievement lies in the poetic quality of these non-objective images, their rich suggestiveness and the quiet effect they have on our sensory awareness. His is a poetry perhaps inspired by geography and the movement of water.

Naming the works "landscapes" allows me to imagine how I associate my own body, or phantasms of my skin and my interior body, with the grainy irregularities of shape that I see in "the stretch." Such irregularities evoke inner anxieties, but they also tempt me to let go and follow the current of light as is flows through the skin. The light in Staartjes's photographs creates a distinct aura or emanation, not one associated with distance (sight) but with proximity (touch) and sensual boundary- surfaces. These highly physical images, manually produced after a laborious process of lighting the sculptural objects, shooting, and developing, betray the artist's love of the tactile aspects of printing. This tactile intensity awards the work its deeper and deeply satisfying emotional resonances.

excerpt reprinted from SPOT, fall 1998, Houston Center for Photography