In ancient Rome, a rose suspended above a gathering signified that everything spoken beneath it was held in confidence. The phrase carried into medieval Europe, carved above confessionals and council chambers as a mark of protected speech. Today, this logic carries into Henri Haake’s paintings which cover as much as they reveal, treating the act of obscuring as a form of custody.

Haake’s sedimented surfaces feel like they’re built by time, as dense strata of paint intervene with the paintings’ ability to be read. Scrawled and striated, these layers appear revised and overworked, as earlier gestures become submerged or revealed. Horses, religious iconography and sculptural statuettes peer from beneath, rendered with enough specificity to register before being gradually absorbed into the surrounding material. They sit somewhere between relic and residue, forms half-returned to the ground they came from.

In doing so, Haake allows our eyes to find a foothold, only to watch it soften beneath a hazy veneer. Muted colours seep through layers to shift the temperature of their earthy surfaces. Their palette is largely warm and dusty, though certain passages carry that cool, blue-tinged reminiscent of the screen. Others provide moments of terracotta warmth, carrying a clayey feel that gestures towards excavation and
discovery, furthering their relic-like quality.
 

Certain works in the show have a feel closer to exposure than painting. Forms emerge the way an image does beneath ultraviolet light: present but provisional, as though the surfaces have been sensitised rather than marked. Many bring to mind cyanotypes, where contact with light fixes an impression without fully resolving it into detail. Haake’s paintings operate in a similar register, where an object is alluded to, rather than depicted. At times they feel printed te