Erik Hoffmann: Autobiography – Painting Life
As a painter, Erik Hoffmann approaches the world by portraying it in an autoethnographic sense. His subjects, understood in a broad sense, are the landscapes of the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, which Hoffmann translates into tempera and acrylic painting—media appropriate to the harsh and, in a certain way, timeless character of the terrain. His contemporaneity is evident in the intertwining of perception and sensation, of inside and outside. In a certain sense, everything becomes a self-portrait: the duck in the boy’s arms, the fox in front of the haystack, and even the haystack itself. The painted grasses, clouds, and island landscapes are both the result of careful observation and a mirror of a turn inward—toward oneself—and only through this, toward others.
As stateless inhabitants, they dwell in a world where the individuality of grass, stone, and lightning merges into an archipelago—a sea of islands befitting the Hebrides—that simultaneously 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 notions of identity that ultimately lead to isolation.
