Untitled, oil, watercolor, and colored pencil on canvas, 55 cm x 45 cm, 2025
To show but not fully reveal is a delicate balance. It can draw the viewer in or leave them searching for orientation. Vero Haas’s paintings from the series us – two places at the same time operate along this threshold: they disclose just enough to provoke curiosity, inviting the eye to search for a steady line that continually withdraws into translucent forms, shifting shapes, and suggested figuration.
“I move between figuration and abstraction. The starting point is personal photographs, which I transfer as drawings to the canvas and then overlay, blur, and fragment in several layers. I am less interested in the original image than in the process of its transformation: the disappearance of certainties, the emergence of intermediate states.” What first appears precise becomes increasingly abstracted, overpainted, and blurred as the process unfolds. Empty zones, intuitive gestures, and layered veils mark what is absent, faded, distorted, or merged.
Vero Haas
“My artistic practice allows me to perceive the world in a more intense and personal way. I am fascinated by the immediacy and intuitiveness of painting, which enables me to translate perception emotionally. Relationships are often at the centre of my work. I am drawn to moments of ambiguity – situations that resist fixed meaning. My work sustains uncertainty, allowing multiple readings to coexist without hierarchy.” Like Haas’s painterly language, memory itself is elusive and continually shifting. Moments once held with certainty recede and become difficult to grasp, yet memory also constitutes us – a composite of accumulated experience. Although time – the underlying anchor of our memories – is often conceived as linear, memories are rhizomatic, extending simultaneously into the past and future. Haas’s paintings seem to share this condition: are they recollections, or points in a time still unfolding?
THE SEGMENT ’JOURNAL GOES SLEEK’ IS A COLLABORATION BETWEEN SLEEK AND JOURNAL, THE MAGAZINE OF THE BERLIN UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS. SLEEK INVITES THE JOURNAL EDITORS TO SHOWCASE WORK FROM THEIR CURRENT ISSUE.
All Photos by VERO HAAS (4). IRVING VILLEGAS
CREDITS
Image 1 Untitled, oil, watercolor, and colored pencil on canvas, 55 cm x 45 cm, 2025
Image 2 All works from the series “us – two places at the same time”, instead of All cry for you, oil, watercolor, and ink on canvas, 35 cm x 40 cm, 2024
Image 3 Vero Haas
Image 4 Caryatids II, oil, watercolor, and fineliner on canvas, 58 cm x 45 cm, 2025
Image 5 It’s destiny II, monotype on handmade paper, 40 cm x 30