New Contemporaries 2021

With references ranging from magic and alchemy to physics and diagrams, Hanne Peeraer’s practice draws equal attention to the imagined and the scientific. She uses translucent paper, glass, plaster and silk to infuse paintings and drawings in such a way that the images seem to play a game of illusory hide and seek with each other in their material form. Familiar elements such as faces or plants are placed in the same world as incomprehensible graphs and maps, through which the work aims to speak to our intuition, tempting us to search for an explanation that is never really there.

Marek Sullivan: The figurative aspects of your work have a Pre-Raphaelite sensibility that complements your choice of support (plaster, prisms) really well, in the sense that Pre-Raphaelite painting always seems about to crack open and reveal something else. Your referential universe of alchemical signs and diagrams seems similarly fragile, since it only just connects to a recognisable esoteric idiom. Sometimes I feel like we live in fractious times partly because our systems of reference have broken down; it’s not that we speak a different language (the Babelian conceit), but that a common language has become siloed into different webs of semiotic and emotional bias that operate at a subconscious level. We’re not speaking different tongues but different magics. If no one shares the same spells anymore, is art still magic?

Hanne Peeraer: I believe that web of biases is as old as language itself, and very similar to it, but I am not sure that art is dependent on it. Or at least, I try not to let my own work inhabit any particular section of the web. It is more fun to zoom out and think of it as a whole, pointing at all of our magics at the same time, and I always found the Pre-Raphaelites fantastically skilled at this. Instead of speaking any specific word, their imagery feels indirect and hesitant, creating a sense of an unintelligible word suspended on the tip of your tongue without ever discovering what it is, or whether it is even really there. To me, magic has to do with intuition, not language; it is not the spell that produces the magic, it is the magician.

text from platform.newcontemporaries.org.uk