EMPATHY THROUGH COLOR
THE ACT OF PAINTING AS AN ACT OF LOVE
Donald Kuspit
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T. W. Adorno has said that "in sharp contrast to traditional art, modern art does not hide the fact that it is something made and produced: on the contrary, it underscores the fact."¹ Hausner's frankly colorful surface "` the "frank surface" that Clement Greenberg said was basic to modernist painting "` underscores the fact that Hausner's pictures are handmade, but the more important point that the patchwork plenitude of colors contradicts the sobriety of the figures with the depth of feeling they convey. If, as the psychoanalyst Marion Milner has argued, "color is, on the evidence of language alone, very closely bound up with the feelings"², then Hausner is not only hurling her strong identificatory feelings for her fermale subjects in our faces, but making their intense, even violent feelings evident through her language of color. These silent, staring, seemingly self-possessed figures, who don't seem to reveal a thing about their psyches, unwittingly reveal their conflicted feelings about themselves through the irrepressible colors that cloth them. "Rage", 1996, seems to be an explicit acknowledgement of the power of abrupt color to instantly convey raw emotion. Hausner seems to favor the tension between green and red, complementary colors that at the same time blatantly contradict each other. Their relationship remains unresolved, like the relationships Hausner pictures. Her pure painterly colors are not only intense in themselves, but dramatically at odds, making it clear that the figures are at odds with themselves, and anxious.
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Irony, eroticism, subliminal madness, conveyed through color, expression, and the oddity of human relationships "` Hausner's people may be socially reconciled, but they are emotionally irreconcilable, to the extent that they don't really communicate "` make up the uncanny substance of Hausner's paintings. To call them realistic is to miss their emotional depth. Or rather they are emotionally realistic in the best tradition of psychological realism "` but also, as I have suggested, with a certain emapthy for her sitters, conveyed by the same color that unmasks them completely. Her attitude does become clinical at times "` analytically observant, even diagnostic - but her empathy tends to win out, particularly when it comes to picturing women. No doubt it is the empathy that matters most - certainly in the new portraits of very individual women - for it gives Hausner the freedom to follow her painterly instincts, that is, to articulate her own emotional situation.
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1 T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 39
2 Marion Milner, The Suppressed Madness of Ane Men (London and New York: Tavistock, 1987, p. 225
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H O M E