The clockwork can serve as a prototype for the formative qualities of Haese’s sculptures: it gains its energy and thus enables its continuation through movement—of the wrist or a pendulum, for example—and requires an external impulse. The disturbance triggered by this comes to a standstill in the starting position of the mechanism when no further impulse occurs. Haese’s sculptures obey a similar system of rules, based on a perfect balancing, on a parallel or antagonistic sequence of movements of the individual parts, whose goal is always to return to rest. This is precisely the difference to a clockwork or so-called kinetic artworks. They are not machines but a kind of organism whose highest maxim is self-preservation in the cycle of forces and forms. The external forms can take on an organic appearance and recall plant cell structures. In both cases—whether emphatically geometric or the irregular organic formal structure—Haese makes use of the seriality of the elements. Overall, the result is objects with an aesthetic of purposelessness. Yet the fineness of the structure, the static delicateness that they exude, is in perfect balance, so that the result is a stability that is very close to fragility.
Haese’s objects exude a poetry and purposelessness that lend them a certain enigmatic quality.
