But now, our boat climbs—hesitates—drops— 
climbs—hesitates—crawls back— 
climbs—hesitates—
Hilda Doolittle 

 

1.

In his “Juilliard Lecture”, John Cage recounted a saying from his master, Dr. Suzuki: “Before studying Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains. While studying Zen, things become confused: one no longer knows exactly what is what. After studying Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains”. When asked about the difference between before and after, the master replied, “No difference, only the feet are a little bit off the ground”. Cage likened the study of Zen to the study of music: “While studying music, things are not clear. (…) Sounds are no longer just sounds, but symbols”.¹

When I observe Thiago Hattnher’s paintings, clarity eludes me as well: I cannot discern whether the colors are merely colors or tonal variations akin to sound. I am uncertain about what constitutes the background and what forms the figure. I cannot find the thread of the narrative—I am unsure of what precedes and what follows. 

2.

I perceive the ochre, rarefied silhouette of a plant, barely distinguishable from the darkness surrounding it. Below, in the lower field of the painting, lies a diffuse landscape in shades of white, blue, green, gray, and sand—a memory of a memory. In another painting, divided into four sections, two landscapes are bordered by a whitened field: in the larger landscape, I hear the rustling of some indeterminate grass shaken by the wind; in the smaller one, I sense the expanse of distance, the movement of the sky. In the seemingly empty space, there is the murmur of silence. “There is no sound without pause. (…) Sound is presence and absence, and is, however unlikely it seems, permeated by silence. There are as many or more silences than sounds in sound (…). But also, conversely, there is always sound within silence”, wrote José Miguel Wisnik in O som e o sentido.² Hattnher’s paintings confront us with this ambivalence of the world: it is both spacious and filled simultaneously. 

3.

“Simultaneously”, I just wrote. Indeed, Hattnher imparts, in his works, a duration akin to elements that evoke traditional genres of painting, whose somewhat spectral or faded remnants seem to find a speculative space there, a postponement, a place on the margins of time. In one canvas, a branch of withered flowers is topped by the green of a blurred landscape—the explosion of a landscape. In another, the orientation of the brushstrokes in an earthy color field seems to make it rain over another field, where the oxidized silhouette of something that once was a flower’s branch—or has yet to become one (note: the painting is not finished!)—extends. The relationship between these fields into which the paintings are divided—with boundaries not entirely rigid—can be read as a form of contemplation: one field scrutinizes the other, weighs itself against the other, like a bird balancing on its own wings. 

4.

For Thiago Hattnher, painting is contemplation: how does each surface receive the pigment? To what extent does one layer of paint overlay what came before? What kind of adhesion exists between certain types of matter? How to prepare the substrate of a canvas so that new types of adhesion occur? How do the acceleration or retraction of these various gestures interfere with the work? To what extent is time—not just the succession of events, but also a meteorological phenomenon—both material and matter of painting? Arranged side by side on the same wall, canvases as distinct as they are related study each other, in an incessant conversation, or do they exhaust themselves? 

Hattnher’s contemplation aligns more with thought, meditation, and preparation than with calculation. In the Houaiss Dictionary, the first definition of the verb “cogitate” is “to think insistently about (something)”. Thinking about something insistently—I think—is also to hesitate: to dwell on a question. To circle an object. To adhere to it. 

5.

Anne Carson hesitated when she received a new work table as a gift, made from woods she had chosen herself. The surface, however, unlike her previous table, was round. Carson tried to position her chair at some point around the new table. She tried one position but soon moved the chair again. All positions seemed wrong. The same happened with the stacks of books she placed on the furniture. “A round desk has no up or down, no north or west, no linearity, no logic”, says Anne Carson, confronted with the disorienting nature of the circular form. “There was nothing to do but hesitate.”³

6.

In English, the verb “to hesitate”—which comes from the Latin verb “haesitare”, meaning “to hold fast”—is also used to express the act of stuttering. “Hesitating is to hold fast/still in a place on the edge of time; stuttering is to hold a sound fast, repeating it, as if this could also repeat the present moment. (…) Time stutters”, said Anne Carson.⁴ 

Stuttering is to stretch the duration of a sound. Spinning on its own axis—and on its own language—the one who hesitates or stutters highlights the relative nature of time. Physicist Carlo Rovelli reminds us that “in the elementary laws that describe the mechanisms of the world, there is no such difference [between past and future]”.⁵ But we perceive the occurrence of time in the most disparate ways: sometimes it slides its blade over our skin, sometimes it is imperceptible and gentle like the opening of a flower. And what to say of the prodigy of memory, which, in a leap, places the past right before us? 

7.

When I face Hattnher’s paintings, my eyes trace a kind of orbit, as if there were an underlying circular structure in them—which perhaps reflects in the rounded edges of some canvases. The path of insistent thought (of contemplation) is not linear; it occurs in whirls, comings and goings, forming layers of impressions that, even when overlapping, allow themselves to be glimpsed, as in the painting where a pink mesh does not entirely cover the stratum of pigments that preceded it. Over this pink mesh, two new partial layers—a floating landscape and a brown rectangle where a bluish flower hovers—recover the tones that came even before the pale pink. 

In this ebb and flow, time is no longer the arrow we feel shooting from the past toward the future: contemplating is also adopting a position on the edge of time, but within the twisted sea of language. 

8.

I think, therefore I hesitate, one might say. And there is nothing stagnant in this hesitation. To contemplate, according to its Latin etymology, is to have something that agitates the spirit. Something also stirs in the seemingly emptied fields that Hattnher’s paintings encompass. “There is no empty space or empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear”, said John Cage—who, in 1951, enclosed in an anechoic chamber that isolates all external noise, heard the low sound of his blood circulation and the high sound of his nervous system.⁶ “Sounds do not need to convey some profound thought. They can simply be sounds”,⁷ Cage also said. Even where there is no figure, there is sound. 

9.
In the large blue-toned canvas, the tension between figure and ground intensifies: everything that might serve as a motif—that which, in music, constitutes the most recognizable part of a composition’s melody—is on the verge of dissolving into a vast and voluminous blue atmosphere. What once resembled the vestige of a still life, a fresco, or a mnemonic trace of a landscape now becomes a scattering of minute emblems: postage stamps never sent, cast adrift in a space as massive as it is segmented—resembling the ocean and its various depths. For I discern certain boundaries within this great deep-blue field: it divides into other rectangular fields, with subtly divergent shades and brushwork of a slightly different temperament. Like a great palate, the background seems poised to absorb the figures. Perhaps the background is, in fact, the motif.

10.
Years ago, I visited the home of a friend who writes screenplays, and I remember seeing, pasted high on her living room wall, large letters cut from kraft paper that read: What’s the subject? I was reminded of this when I read The Wisdom of Art, Roland Barthes’s essay on the paintings of Cy Twombly. Barthes opens his text by saying that, when faced with a painting, we always ask: What is going on here? He writes: “In classical painting, what is happening is the subject of the canvas—a subject that is often anecdotal (…). But in Twombly’s paintings, the subject is a concept”.⁸

Unlike Twombly’s works, whose titles, according to Barthes, operate as a kind of labyrinth, Hattnher’s paintings bear no name. The artist does not even offer us a breadcrumb. So then—what is going on here? Or rather: What’s the subject? I like to think that Thiago Hattnher places us before everything that is entailed in the insistent and impure act of painting: the cogitation that causes one to hesitate between image and concept, ground and figure, before and after, ebb and flow, sound and silence. It is a form of thinking that resists settling into an idea, that resists arriving at its final shape. I paint, therefore I cogitate, therefore I hesitate—and therefore I return to paint once more.

 

1 John Cage, Silence — Lectures and Readings by John Cage. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.

2 José Miguel Wisnik, O som e o sentido. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2017, pp. 20, 21. 

3 “Hesitation”. Lecture at the Museo Nacional del Prado in 2023. Video available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9dNpWq9e1Q&t=10s.

4 Idem.

5 Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time. Translated by Erica Segre. New York: Riverhead Books, 2018.

6 John Cage, Silence — Lectures and Readings by John Cage. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1973, p. 8.

7 John Cage & Morton Feldman, Radio Happenings: Conversations — 1966-1967. Köln: Edition Musik Texte, 2015, p. 30.

8 Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms. Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985, p. 190.