Greta Hauser’s paintings are large monochromatic close-ups of hands: sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by an isolated facial trace or a disheveled head of hair, but always revealing to us that, just as extreme distance does, excessive proximity causes the disappearance of the individuality of the subject represented.

Her point of view reminds us of Proposition CCLXXI of Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting, where he states that it is “impossible for a memory to retain all the aspects of any member of any animal. An impossibility that geometrically demonstrates the infinite divisibility of any continuous quantity.”

Thus, in each of Greta’s works, fragments of a single body are transfigured into multiple unusual jewels that enrich our vision by disregarding every recognizable sign of identity, showing us the inexhaustible richness of the nameless being hidden beneath every habitual name.

Hands are, after the face, the most expressive parts of our anatomy, and the most difficult to look at without reading some specific meaning into them. Given their intimate affinity with writing, hands themselves tend to become hieroglyphs; therefore, Greta Hauser, with the refined sensitivity of an artist specializing in our tactile extremities, avoids any allusion to coded language such as the sign language of the deaf or the traditional mudras of Hindu sculpture, allowing the hands, finally as hand-signs in themselves, to express themselves freely, detached from every conventional code.

The monochromatic severity of her compositions, resembling the stark chiaroscuros of the finest black-and-white photography, serves to highlight the rich essence of her pictorial strategy by revealing an infinity of tonal nuances inaccessible to any photomechanical reproduction.

By concentrating on a certain fragment of a face or on a few fingers that happen by chance to dip into the ray of light that isolates them, Greta Hauser’s works, as good art always does, teach us to see again what we thought we had already seen.

Arturo Rosenblueth