Toulu Hassani: Circling the Evolute
Toulu Hassani’s second solo exhibition at Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle merges her two key methodologies: delicate oil paintings and visual objects made of artificial resin. Her distinct interest in the way humans try to interpret and represent the world through theories and models is intrinsic to, and clearly visible in, her works. How can unconnected and unexplained vicinities become graspable, and what underlying order is holding it all together? Science’s tireless drive toward understanding and describing the world in its smallest details and largest contexts is what fascinates Hassani. One always notes the extraordinary accuracy that goes into both the execution and the preceding meticulous trials in which materials, colors, papers, or forms are tested.
In her new works, Hassani masterfully picks up on her typical paintings, in variations on structures that move across the entire screen and let the beholder’s eye search in vain for a beginning, end, middle, and system. Miniature-like staircase forms are twisted inversely; one is reminded of representations of helixes. Hassani is often inspired by scientific theories and their abstraction of micro-realm realities as well as, for instance, approaches to physical phenomena like gravitational fields and force lines, or even cartography. Topics like thermodynamics or space-time curvature and their respective visual and mathematical languages in the form of density allocations or matrixes are variants that serve to describe the world and the cosmos in abstracted formulas and illustrations. Scientific approaches and models are used by Hassani such that she develops them further with her own formal concepts, following no line of argument but placing the focus on that which cannot be expected. Never wanting to explain the world, her works only want to complement it for their own sake and stand for themselves.
