About

Eric Haacht is a self-taught portrait painter based in the South West of England. Born in the 1980s, Haacht has been painting for just over ten years and his first portrait was painted in 2011. Since then, Haacht's interest has focused solely on portraits, with a goal to explore a concern with the ‘immediacy and artificialness of life (and death)’ and a yearning to demonstrate a hunch that ‘time and form are a mere ruse’.

The distorted and obscured faces in Haacht's paintings raise questions about our own identity and whether we outwardly project personas which do not reflect our true selves - especially in an era where social media is so pervasive. But Haacht himself is more concerned with broader existential questions, including whether time and existence are simply illusions.

Despite the high level of abstraction in his work, Haacht’s paintings are immediately identifiable as portraits - faces made up of a tangled confusion of paint which has been pulled across the surface of the canvas.