About
Simone Haack
Les Fruits du Mal
October 16 — November 13, 2026
Opening hours
Tue–Fri 12–5 PM
Sat 12–4 PM
Mon–Sun Closed
Simone Haack, September 2026
Exhibition statement for CFHILL
Les Fruits du mal The Inside in the Outside
In my paintings, I am interested in the body as the site of the self and the stage for psychic movements. It is the membrane where the inner shows itself on the outside: in the skin, in the hair, in the peel of a fruit. Hair is part of the body, a marker of identity and at the same time a boundary between nature and culture. I am interested in the animal side of humans and the human side of animals. In my paintings, animals can stand in for the human being; fruits and landscapes, too, are given a physical and psychological charge.
The title Les Fruits du mal alludes to Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. In Baudelaire, beauty and decay, desire and abyss stand side by side. I am interested in the shift from fleurs to fruits, because the fruit is more strongly tied to the body, to ripeness and to flesh. I wanted to paint fruits that whet the appetite and yet stand on the animal side. They are something brought forth, ripened, vulnerable: ”fruits” of inner states.
The exhibition shows mainly still lifes, landscapes and portraits, as well as abstract paintings. The still lifes are composed in the manner of the Old Masters: fruits and vegetables are piled into heaps and pyramids, often set against romantic landscape vistas, huddled close together like figures in a group portrait. And yet some wear hair or fur, while others show skin, folds and sheen. They have posture; some resemble portraits and are treated as such in the painting, too. The landscapes are not places that exist: golden forests, blossoms in twilight, spaces in which trunks, leaves and petals themselves become bodies. The abstract paintings, in which hair becomes pure painting, lie between abstraction and hyperrealism. The genres blend into one another.
I use the means of realism to paint things that do not exist. I am not interested in depicting the world as it is but in creating a new reality. One source for this is my dream diaries, which I have been keeping since 1994. I write and draw my dreams in them. Psychic processes become visible in dreams, and I’m particularly interested in the logic of dreams: unexpected twists, moments of shock or joy.
Ambivalence is central to me because it opens up the pictorial space and prevents unambiguous readings. Beauty and the uncanny, humour and menace meet. The uncanny rarely reveals itself directly; rather, it manifests as a sense of foreboding. I am interested in the moment when something familiar ceases to be unambiguous and another reality becomes visible.