Mike Hansen's abstract structures bring together sculpture and painting – two of modern art's diverging disciplines. In doing so, he has liberated his painting from the standard format of rectangular supports, and in turn, has lent a multiplicity of surface textures, colours and tones to his sculpture. The result is a body of work that seems to resist characterization as either sculpture or painting. Curiously, this resistance to classification may be part of the reason that Hansen's work seems to draw comparisons with food. Food and art – in judgements of quality, it is remarkable how the two overlap. Food nourishes the body, and it is said that art nourishes the soul. And one can speak of a hunger for art, a thing that drives artists to take inert material and to shape it in a way that not only resembles, but elicits inchoate desire.
Art and food have always intersected in that part of the brain that reacts to flavours, scents, textures and colours. The art of cooking demands that the dish be appropriately salty or sweet. The oils should add richness without being excessive. Acidity should create tartness without becoming astringent. Herbs and spices should be complimentary, adding liveliness, and all of the ingredients should be fresh. In the end it should also look good. We need the basic food groups, yet we also long for variety and surprise.
In art, we demand that dominant forms or colours have counterbalancing textures or tones. The materials should have a consistency and a density that in itself is a source of delight. Colours should be rich – the pigment saturating its binder - being not just the image of colour, but it’s very stuff. Or it can be diluted, where suitable – semi-transparent, like, say mineral water and orange juice, to counter aridity and heaviness. Textures should be alternatingly smooth and creamy, or coarse and staccato - the softness and uniformity of the first quality brought into relief by the sharpness and variety of the second.
Mike Hansen likes to cook. He also likes to watch a lot of TV. The amount of television he watches is probably not unlike that of the rest of the world, however how he watches, may be slightly different. Being the child of an advertising executive, Hansen has an ambivalent relationship to television. For Hansen, the subject of television is its commercial messages. Drawn to the medium, Hansen is acutely aware of the subtly constructed sales pitches behind the seemingly innocent narratives of pleasure and satisfaction. Commercial television is the land of infinite desire and instant satisfaction, a world of sybaritic images of abundance, comfort and luxury; where the price is always right, where major corporations do it all for you, and where cars are not only tried and tested, but are also faithfully true to their owners. As an art form, television not only reflects the desires of its audience, but draws and shapes those desires.
It is the pitch that Hansen drags out of the low art form of commercial television into the disinterested world of fine art. It is the hard sell, and the soft sell, the continuing, unrelenting, all embracing SELL, SELL, SELL of commercial television that he attempts to distill in the form of shape and colour and texture. Crass salesmanship is annoying. Really good salesmanship is seductive. Identifying the pitch - the buy me, have me, eat me, message in a commercial – is the inspiration for his work. What does a really good SELL feel like? Does it have mouth appeal? Does it feel like sex? How do you describe the feeling of being sold to?
But Hansen is not prescribing the literal reading of his work. Television advertisements provide him with raw material, not meaning or keys to interpretation. What Hansen is really interested in is how it feels, how those hooks are built, and whether they can be transferred into the static medium of relief sculpture. He finds a frame in a commercial which he identifies as the pitch and becomes the inspiration for a piece. The piece begins as a drawing – a geometric or biomorphic abstraction. Hansen animates the image by building the component parts of the drawing into three dimensions. "Animated" is the operative word here. Comparing his finished work to his drawings, or even to a two-dimensional reproduction of the same work, one notes how the work's components feel animate – seem to breathe with independent life, as if they were growing out of the wall. This pulsating, organic quality that Hansen lends the individual elements of his work is further enhanced by his application of surface texture and colour with the medium of encaustic.
The colours come from the ad's dominant colour scheme and contrast of tones. The shapes are determined by the abstract quality of the television image – the visual hooks and dynamics produced by camera angles, sets and the character of the narrative. Dynamic, active commercials showcasing excitement and speed may feature acute angles, as can be found for example in the work You Can Too, 1997. Commercials selling comfort and security may feature gentle curves and rounded edges as in Within Your Reach I, II and III of 1998/99. Advertisements extolling solid, dependable engineering may feature the appearance of symmetrical stability as in Made Better, 1996.
Using encaustic ensures that Hansen's works remain within the larger embrace of the art of painting. Without the encaustic, the surfaces would be come hard and the forms would retain a fabricated "look," resembling more constructivist or minimalist sculpture, like the work Pity, 1997, for example, where he uses plain hardwood flooring on one half of the work. In contrast to the white encaustic covered element of the other half of the piece, the hardwood lends the whole the character of a collage, and a perhaps tongue in cheek reference to the Formica covered minimalist sculptures of American artist Richard Artschwager.
Hansen's use of encaustic, however, reminds us that these objects are first and foremost paintings. Edges and surfaces of are only vaguely definable as beginnings and endings. Here, there are intimations of depth, where one can see below the surface, where the encaustic is alternatingly densely pigmented and partially translucent. Over there, the surface bubbles and heaves. A creamy coat of encaustic is scraped and scumbled across a darker brown, like butterscotch on toast, in Legs Like Jelly, 1998. In Put a Spell on You, 1997, a golden yellow hue bubbles through a dark layer of burnt umber, recalling the mid-plate collisions of gravy and melted butter. Texture and colour, tone and contrast, saturation and transparency combine here to evoke gustatory pleasures.
But good painting is not just about wanting to eat it. Our better judgement allows us to enjoy and to let many things pass through our hands without sticking them in our mouths. Hansen uses the semi-translucency of the medium to allow colours to come through in compositions -- to smooth transitions in works that, without it, would have the colour subtleties of a bank machine. For example, the two shaped canvases that make-up With-in Our Reach III, 1999, each have a barely visible underpainting of green that mitigates the contrasting red/white colour scheme of the piece. Similarly, With-in Our Reach I & II, 1999, shows evidence of green and blue underpainting, creating a unity from the contrast.
Mike Hansen's hybrid structures, are mute objects and symbols of desire. Released from the conventions of sculpture and painting, they exist completely in neither two dimensions or three dimensions. The works demand response where taste and desire meet; in the salivary glands. Hovering, in front of our eyes, slightly higher, in front of that part of the brain that governs gratification, our longing takes shape. Mmmmm, good.
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