Bertram Hasenauer: Cheek by jowl

Faces appear caught in blinding bursts of white light or slip into dark silvery shadows. Cheek by Jowl, Bertram Hasenauer’s latest solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Wandsworth presents a new series of captivating portraits rendered in graphite and coloured pencil on paper. Each image is the result of an intense and exacting process in which the facial features are slowly built up through layers to create what Hasenauer calls ‘an idea of a figure’ rather than a portrait of a specific individual. Yet, somehow, these works still feel close, intimate. How much of an image or line do we need to be given to complete the picture? At what point does perception end and imagination begin?

While Hasenauer originally trained as a jewellery maker and a sculptor, he now typically works with paint. This recent shift to drawing has not only required a period of experimentation, but also brought about an even more concentrated way of working that relies on him using only the weight of the pencil to create a balance between light and dark, softness and precision. In the ‘light’ drawings, especially, this process seems to unfold before us. In You somehow slip away (2), for instance, a spectral female figure appears to simultaneously come into focus and dissipate back into white. Concrete, tactile details – the strands of her fair, the brightness of her eyes and texture of lips – emerge from a hazy cloud of white, like a snow storm blowing in from the bottom left-hand corner. This creates a curious feeling of precarity and longing whereby we find ourselves wanting to hold on to the image as if it were a memory: to make it whole, to pull it out from the past.

By contrast, the ‘dark’ drawings draw us deeper into the surface of the image. Here, facial features – the outline of a nose, the arch of an eyebrow – appear in silvery glimpses as if illuminated by candlelight. In these works, the luminosity comes from the material itself – the graphite – through a process that Hasenauer likes to hammering metal to the point where it becomes bright and smooth. Yet a sense of mystery remains: some details are clear and precise while others remain buried in the shadows.

The title of the exhibition – Cheek by jowl – alludes both literally to the close crop of the drawings and the way in which they fill the paper as well as to a feeling of discomfort that comes from recognising but not being able to full envision the figures that Hasenauer depicts. It is this discomfort that invites us to look more closely, to not just perceive but to actively engage with each image.