At the core of the long tradition of western portraiture is the novelty of eschewing the narrative of the tableau for the sake of a complete encounter in the single gaze. The work of Adam Hahn, still in his twenties, makes reference to this heritage partly through his technical attention to detail and partly through his bold switches of scale - ironically, given this onscreen context - evident only in gallery exhibition.  There is his gesture on the one hand towards antique miniaturism as in Angel of the North, and on the other towards contemporary advertising in the metre high canvases of inquisitive children, tousle-haired youths, shirt-sleeved businessmen, or contemporary knights  of the realm.

Hahn's almost-bare palette quotes from the more sober schools of early photography while nodding to contemporary movements antagonistic to literalism and the figurative.  The apparently effortlessly constructed surface simulacra and straight-to- camera positioning of each subject in the frame acknowledge a debt to the cool severity of his minimalist predecessors. 

What marks his work in particular is the uncanny intensity below his surfaces, a sense of something inappropriately, aggressively intelligent and mysterious in his subjects’ glance askance, or their return of the gaze to the viewer. After his historical referencing, his searching technique, his reticent palette and his adventurous play with scale, it is the exploration of the thought behind the gaze which identifies a painting as one of Hahn’s.

P.M.

PORTRAITS OF

MACULAR DEGENERATION

Adam Hahn’s most recent exhibition once against concerned itself with the gaze. This was an exhibition of paintings of people as if seen through their different levels of macular degeneration, a condition which causes deterioration of the central focus of vision.

Twice a recipient of the BP Portrait Award hosted by the National Portrait Gallery, London, Hahn had a year in which to research MD.  With the assistance of The London Project to Cure Blindness, he spent time with patients suffering from the condition, and gathered data at Moorfields Eye Hospital and the Institute of Ophthalmology.  He used his research to direct these paintings.