Hans Binder – looking for a common thread through his artistic work – found an ‘art historical’ motto: “Chaos and the order”, which has a long history.

He calls his artistic concern a symbiosis of ‘emotion and analytics’, another description for an ongoing confrontation between opposites, which have been repeatedly subjected to more detailed consideration in the theory of art history. It is the indissoluble play between the line and the colour. If the line is the guiding principle of the idea, the clarity, the precision, then the colour is the chaos, the spawling, the lively, the organic and the enriching. Colour alone would blur, run out, would not find its way, if it weren’t for the line that gives support and leads the thought to the next crossroads. Considerations in the wide field of painting, drawing and printmaking allow these distinctions to become perceptible again and again. It is the finely drawn boundaries where the lines hold or lose themselves and were painting dissolves into chaos or retrains its structure.

Even as an adolescent, Hans Binder focused his interest on nature. But first he occupied himself with copying landscape pictures from the Wachau (Lower Austria*). After etched views of famous farmsteads and well-known views from the Danube valley, he trained his eye and his still inexperienced hand. However, copying these templates only served him as an entry point into the climbing garden of artistic search. Very soon he began to draw and paint directly from the nature. Loose pen drawings in ink and bistre were created – especially since the Academy of Fine Arts also showed him the way to the graphic freedom. Watercolours require a lot of water, so much that there are puddles and small lakes between the edges of the paint and on the rippling wet paper, whereby attractive ‘impressionistic’ accents sometimes emerge. The search for the forms of the nature does not relate so much to the contours or structures of the model, but rather to the impressions and moods that are conveyed through colour. This is how sketchy pen drawings and atmospheric watercolours are created early on.

Artistic pursuit had to recede into the background during the years of his professional life, but always remained a living source of experience.

Hans Binder has undertaken several journeys in his life which have had a significant influence on him. A trip to Greece in the 1970s left traces that shaped his style from then on.  From an art historical point of view, this trip was a ‘Grand Tour’ as it led to the ancient models. Columns, spolia and the Mediterranean brilliance of the colours influenced his themes and his palette. A trip to Egypt followed later, which was probably even more formative for Hans Binder, since the depiction of the Egyptian pyramids, the sand and the glaring light opposes the colourful depiction of our latitudes.

The sky is not only blue and the desert is not only yellow, but offers a wealth of colour nuances, quite challenging artistic realisation of which is quite a challenge. Shadows turn into dark violet and the sand is perceived almost as a painting medium.

In Sicily, too, the artist finds the intensity of nature and surrenders to it. But he still wants more, the lines, the contours and the surfaces and the depths are not enough, he looks for the profile on the surface of his drawings, as if the landscape were growing towards him through the picture. Hans Binder uses a trick. He glues pieces of paper, those with a profile, for example pieces of a cardboard box or crumpled tissue paper, which when wet look like pieces of skin pushed together on to the surface of his landscape depictions. For the artist they are a landscape within a landscape and are perceived by him as “coincidence” and at the same time serve as welcome invitations to design.

Colour runs together in the channels of the folded paper and small rivers form and valleys branch out into new landscapes. Opaque white gives the surface profile and at the same time forms bridges to coloured lowlands in which green, yellow and ochre collect. Binder plays with the so-called coincidences and pushes the horizon upwards so that – as in the medieval panel painting – the landscape appears as a steeply sloping terrain, with houses and roofs at the upper third of the watercolour and gives the viewer the impression of a country lying beyond. In this respect, Hans Binder has increased his style to a mannerist form of expression that also shows him his limits.

Influenced by trips to the Mediterranean region, Hans Binder developed a palette between brown, green and yellow which further enriched by a stay in Zakopane (Poland). Dark forests, steep roofs, like those still to be found in Poland, and a dark green that combines with blue-violet to create an almost mystical, fairy-tale atmosphere, bring new accents to the large-format watercolours. Hans Binder consistently pursues the theme of landscape, which represents a constant challenge for him to come close to the essence of nature. He not only seeks to capture the rendering of the landscape, its style and colourfulness, but also to works out the characteristic essence contained in it. The mystical essence of Zakopane, and the light and the fragmentation of Burgenland fields and pieces of the forest of Neumarkt/Raab (Burgenland/Austria*) appeal to the viewers memory of the essence of a landscape. In recent years Neumarkt/Raab became an important place for artistic experience and development, as Binder has been coming to Neumarkt not only as a student but also as a teacher, where courses in various disciplines are held during the summer months. As a teacher Hans Binder has now established a regular audience, and as a student he began to devote himself to etching under the guidance of Christoph Donin (1930-2013*).

In the meantime, etching with its almost infinite number of graphic possibilities, has grown into a second form of artistic expression. In this medium too, the landscape plays the main role, but new themes have been added. Still lives with animals and plants caught the artist’s interest.

Now, however, new artistic tasks arise with printmaking, since the paint, which in watercolour coagulates into small pools with dark edges and it speaks a different language in printmaking. The liquid appearance of the watercolour can technically be implemented in the etching – be it with sugar ink or free etching in aquatint – but the effect is different, since the colour is mostly limited to one tone, be it black, brown or another. “Colourfulness” arises from an abundance of graphic nuances, mostly of one colour tone, which constitutes the appeal of printmaking.

Here, too, Hans Binder has found his own tonality, which oscillates between brown-green and green-brown. Only rarely are prints in black found.

Prints in black colour mostly are first test prints, which are intended to indicate how far the etching of a line has succeeded or whether the depth of the aquatint surface is sufficient for a plate tone. Does watercolour still offer the possibility of changing colour and structure for example if you paint over the dried surface – this is considerably more difficult in etching and requires a lot of skill. Some things can hardly be erased, others can only be strengthened. If a line is deeply etched into the coper plate there is hardly any way to completely grind out this indentation. Often the only option left is to strengthen the problematic area and thereby change it.

It is no coincidence that Hans Binder came to etching, since this graphic technique, like watercolour with its added paper structures, offers zones of the “accidental”. Acid stains, differently etched aquatint zones are creative measures to form spatiality, light and shadow zones and to set graphic accents. But the technique requires more precision – what is still tolerated in the flowing style of the watercolour – finds no mercy in etching. But this is exactly part of the challenge of printmaking technology.

Hans Binder goes a step further. In his recent works he combines etching with watercolour, sometimes a risky procedure, since both graphic techniques have their own rules and do not always get along. But in the experimental stage everything allowed. It serves to shape and gives space to new ideas. Prophecies are not appropriate here, but the question arises as to whether Hans Binder will develop a new path for himself that will combine the haptic moment of the paper structures used in watercolour with the etched surfaces and graphic accents of the etching. The next few years will tell.

Veronika Birke, April 2008