Hypnotic PlotsHypnotic Plots
Hermetika, Berlin · 2023
I see you
I first came across Janes work in 2019 on Instagram, and I thought to myself,
as someone who usually placed a single figure on a blank background: ‘Hey,
amazing paintings, I want to move more in that direction.’ The colors, shapes, and
figures in his images were all intricately intertwined, with multiple backgrounds
and foregrounds, and there was so much going on. At the time, I didn’t quite un
derstand what was happening in his work, but that’s often what makes a painting
interesting, not fully comprehending what’s going on. I admired his ability to cre
ate, for my standards, such complex works. Sistine Chapel, no comparison.
Now, imagine someone coming in and starting to paint over things in that chapel,
adding new lines, and just covering the entire ceiling with a soft shade of pink.
You’d want to scream or say, ‘No, stop, everything was fine the way it was.’ Or
you might think, ‘What the fuck is going on with this person, where’s this change
of heart coming from?’ And the person stands there, in front of the emptiness of
the pink tone, and takes a deep, relieved breath. Because even though emptiness
and not knowing usually scare us, everything is now prepared for change. And as
we all know, only change remains constant
Personally, I can’t stand it when the Butzer always does the Butzer and the Grosse
does the Grosse and I always think to myself: Don’t you get bored when every
thing is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy?
And Janes, he just had enough of the ingrained patterns. And if you ask me, he
did something quite rare and courageous. He looked at his own work and thought,
‘This can’t continue like this.’ But what comes next?
The classic move is to reach for the sketchbook and play with lines, experiment
ing with them. The aesthetics that come out of playing around on paper might not
initially be the final result, but it’s not about the final result in these new painting
processes. It’s about enduring, waiting, and maintaining calm to strike at the
right moment with a new shape, color, or line. Maybe add a circle in the bottom
right corner? Maybe paint over everything in the middle with transparent white? A
wrong decision? A brilliant move that couldn’t be planned with your little human
brain and your ingrained hand movements?
You never know.
The figures, shapes, and sketches are the reservoir from which a painting can
emerge. When I first put a face or a pair of eyes on a canvas, I feel reassured,
I know where it’s heading. But Janes, he’s bothered by that. He sees it as a
challenge to construct the rest of the picture around the disruptive element
of ‘staring eyes.’ People can be so different, even though the common citizen
thinks, ‘Ah, a painter.’
You can’t really call Janes works a construct; they’re not, at least not in terms
of vibe, compared to the Sistine Chapel
before them.
Here’s a question: How do artists actually know when a painting is finished?
There are friendly faces, relationships between objects (or should I say sub
jects?) among them, perhaps stories being told. Some paintings have sub
dued colors, and the artist works with texture and glazing and is more painter
ly. It’s that ‘showing off what you can do,’ that ‘Ah, a painter.’ Other paintings
are vibrant and colorful, much like what I do, and I instantly understand. At
first, I didn’t understand what was new. But now, I almost prefer the new be
cause it has the power of exploration and discovery. Exploration is always life,
and life is creation, and the urge to create, that’s probably what being an artist
is all about (God complex).
Moreover, there’s not much more to life than constant searching, my dear
friends. And I find that so beautiful. After
visiting the studio, I was exhausted, but also fulfilled because looking at these
many paintings opened a new door within me. The incredible diversity within
his yet clearly recognizable Janespaintings inspired me to let go of the ex
pectations, both from others and from myself. It may sound clichéd, but talk to
Janes about his paintings, and your heart will eventually
open up a little.
Text by Sophia Süßmilch
vs.vs.
Galerie Clages, Köln · 2026-06-27
Janes Haid-Schmallenberg explores in his works how a painting can tell a story. As the
artist continually seeks to explore the means at his disposal in new ways, the visual
language and narrative potential of his works consequently vary. The beings created
from paint inhabit worlds that exist only in Haid-Schmallenberg’s paintings. Often,
these invented forms are not rendered as uniform figures, but are composed—in an
incredibly diverse manner—of various constellations of color, planes, and lines. This
approach results in compositions that inextricably and very specifically link the
figurative to a rhythmic oscillation of all pictorial elements.
Text by Prof. Guido Reuter
