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Hans Bricker in the Tropics

Nine feet wide by six feet tall, Hans Bricker in the Tropics is a cartoon-like vacation-snapshot-in-paint with overtones of mixed media or collage. It shows a man and a dog posed in the near foreground as a sunset sky vibrates around them and a rural tropical vista sprawls behind and below. In the lower left corner, a tree-topped bluff teeters above a patch of beach and ocean. In the center, a grassy lowland of scattered palms and other trees extends to the horizon–a third of the way up the painting–widening as it does so around the edge of a farm field nearby in the lower right corner. An irrigation ditch runs from the foreground to the far edge along the field. A golden-maned, brown-and-tan Pinto horse appears laughably obscured behind the man’s head, in the middle distance. Presumably this man is Hans.

Visible from the waist up, and rising to the height of the treetops around him by the point of his handicraft sunhat, Hans stands at the left with an akimbo elbow pointing to the bluff and his askew mouth open like he’s speaking. The flat-faced dog stands in the center of the picture fully in view above the ankles, with a comically discomposed expression. Over the dog’s head, Hans’ thumb and fingers dangle from an outstretched arm, scratching the top.

Underneath his conical hat, nearly nothing of Hans or his clothes is flat-sided or rectangular in outline. Yet somehow he appears made-of-bricks: In neat array, level with the ground, and mortared in, like a wall. More specifically, Hans seems made as if from carefully collaged-together cutouts from a brickwork brochure: One variety of brickwork supplying his hair, another the skin of his face. His sleeves and vest are two others. The bricks are similarly red, but parts of Hans appear lighter or darker by their combination with different mortar colors, and other contrast is supplied by bumps on the brick faces and pins in between.

In a few places, Hans’ brickwork deviates from convention. Though level as latitude lines across most of his round head, within an edge sliver on the left, it runs in a steep incline to his hat–seemingly to depict hair. A row of bricks follows the oval of his mouth, and others circle the orange and yellow glowing discs of his two eyes, each ringed in metallic blue. Evoking windows on a cruise ship, they seem to reflect the sunset sky above.

Roy De Forest painted Hans in 1974, and it’s an example of a well established movement called “Funk Art.” But just a couple years before, to characterize his own work, De Forest coined the term “Nut Art.” De Forest is having some kind of fun either way.

It’s simple fun to see the show-worthy horse featured only in parts: The front sticking from the right of Hans’ head and the rear from the left. Hans’ handwoven plant fiber hat looks about as ridiculous, but not in every way so laughable. Supposing Hans bought it to complete and complement his red brickness, that’s one thing. But does he think he’s accomplishing more?

Nothing in the landscape that surrounds him bears any resemblance to Hans. De Forest presents a tourist who is out of his element, oblivious to the situation in which he is posing for posterity. It’s an invitation to see Hans as unenlightened in all kinds of ways.

Regarding his choice of hat, maybe Hans thinks he’s blending in, or paying compliment to local fashion, or manifesting his embrace, if only for a few days, of a whole other way of thinking?

Laughable in this day and age, maybe, but edgy in 1974. Distinctively similar hats had been appearing for decades in photos from the war in Vietnam, from which the United States had just withdrawn its troops. It was a time to reflect on the causes of it all; and for an artist, maybe to infuse the process with some levity.

Whatever De Forest’s exact goal, he pulled out the stops and went for broke with Hans. Each step closer to the painting seems to reveal more detail, almost like a fractal. Across the sunset sky are arrays of roughly triangular sky-blue shapes, which up close suggest the cartoon face of a dog–a dot of black paint at one point for the nose, two others nearby for the eyes and a shaggy opposing edge to suggest a neckline. Arrays of ostensibly similar white-shapes-with-red-dots alternate, with two to seven dots evenly spaced around their perimeters. Dots of other colors swirl in single file in some places and elsewhere provide infill. Each dot has the physical form of a miniature Hershey’s kiss, creating an illusion of deeper detail: Pin-sharp centers and banding of the blue dog eyes, for instance, made by the shadows and glint of their tiny tapered tips. Draping nearly to the horizon, phantasmic flags or bizarrely muralized stalactites, hang in the sky between the dark-green pom-pom tree tops of palms. On one of them, a pair of dogs appears. A womanly brick person appears on another. Are these Hans’ ideas of home? Do the dangling points and hovering mini-dogs represent bunting and confetti in the foreground, or distant features as big as the sky?

It’s impossible to take Hans literally or personally. What’s for sure is De Forest had a sense of humor, and it’s a lot to do with dogs.