Threads of Yesterday by Eric Haacht

Threads of Yesterday by Eric Haacht

About the Artist:

Eric Haacht is a self-taught portrait painter based in a remote part of the UK. The eighties born artist has been painting for ten years, The first portrait was painted in 2011 and since then has only painted portraits with the goal to explore a concern with the ‘immediacy and the artificialness of life (and death)’ and a yearning to demonstrate that his hunch that ‘time and form are a mere ruse’.

The distorted and obscured faces raise questions about our own identity and whether we outwardly project personas which do not reflect our true selves, especially so in an era where social media is so pervasive. But Haacht himself is more concerned with much broader existential questions about whether time and existence themselves are just illusions. Despite the high level of abstraction, the British painter’s works are still immediately identifiable as portraits as faces are made up of a tangled confusion of paint which has been pulled across the surface of the canvas.

Eric Haacht’s expressive paintings fall into the realm of portraiture yet remain ambiguous, features only emerging unintentionally through his swirling brush strokes and enfolding vivid colours. The figures are not literal self-portraits, but for Eric, something of the self emanates through them as he paints quickly and subconsciously. He describes his works as like diary entries, a repetitive daily process through which he captures certain moods or emotions.

“My paintings are essentially about life and death, I think all forms of portraiture are really a way of confronting our own mortality, and leaving something of ourselves behind.”

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