Erik Hoffmann: Autobiography – Painting Life
As a painter, Erik Hoffmann approaches the world by portraying it in an autoethnographic sense. His subjects, broadly understood, are the structures of the Outer Hebrides in Scotland, which Hoffmann translates into tempera and acrylic painting — media that suit the rough and, in a way, timeless nature of this landscape.
His contemporaneity reveals itself in the interweaving of perception and emotion, the merging of inner and outer worlds. In this way, everything becomes a kind of self-portrait: the duck in the boy’s arms, the fox before the hay bale, and even the hay bale itself.
The painted grasses, clouds, and island landscapes are both the result of careful observation and a mirror of introspection — and only through this introspection does an opening toward others emerge. They inhabit, as homeless beings, a world in which the individuality of grass, stone, and lightning merges into an archipelago — an island sea akin to the Hebrides — that at once unites and separates them.
The metaphorical connection between landscape and figure becomes, in the sense of new materialism, an ontological concept in which everything is interconnected and mutually dependent. This understanding of humanism asserts itself in a world shaped by a notion of identity that ultimately leads to isolation.
