Weight and troubles pull us down. The bones dry out and the mind subsides. But like the raised finger of John the Baptist, Olaf Hanel’s message resonates: recall physical movement and the flight of the soul upwards. His message is carried by poetic bubbles in his cycles of works on paper, the statue of towers of buckets or thimbles, drawings that recall ideal vertebrae. Eugen Brikcius speaks of Hanel’s “perpendicular ecstasy”.

Tall, slender and alone like his statues, turned with his face toward the skies. Olaf Hanel patiently adds line to line in his laborious drawings and graphics. He balances colors of whirling rings, which break away from the chaos and resemble mandalas. He continually changes his artistic expression save a single exception: Bubbles. He has been resuscitating them for 40 years — he breathes life into his India ink bubbles, which he catches and “pins” on paper like rare butterflies. To his great pleasure, both black and colored leave an impression on the paper.

In the aridity of this year’s summer we believe even in the distant waving of butterfly wings. Somewhere high above, the wind will disperse the wave, which will bring us at least a few drops of rain. Let Hanel’s bubbles be a portent of our hopes and delight before it really begins to rain.
Pavlína Bartoňová