"In Between"

13/09 - 26/10/2008

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Heske de Vries (°1954, NL) makes small size paintings that are to be read and viewed as pages from a diary, wherein the artist has registered and imagined events, places and impressions. These do not only refer to the presentation of recent experiences but also the ones from memories and associations from a further past.

The selection of paintings that we choose for this exhibition refers to topics, which are strikingly ordinary and everyday. Still lifes and landscapes are a recurrent theme in her work and it are also subjects that everyone can relate to.

Additionally, we opted to show a number of her works that sketch a less harmonious image of the world and show us a more chaotic environment but are in a way perhaps more familiar to us than the idyll of the romantic landscape. Garbage lying about or media pictures of an accident also belong to our everyday reality.

Heske de Vries draws and paints everyday things as if it were containers of emotions that can bring back her former or elsewhere felt experiences again. Her work looks familiar and trusted to the spectator but appears to be very personal at the same time. She states : “Contemporary things that are dominant or, on the other hand, silently present and that I observe and explore. What matters to me are the substantive aspects that the everyday things bring forward and that I try to express by adjusting my way of painting to what it should mean to me. In other words, not everything should be painted in the same way, each topic dictates, in a way of speaking, his own way of painting. “ The painterly solution gives a twist to the everyday reality. The paintings are therefore each time different in their technical form. Sometimes the layer of paint is thin and the touch loose and sketchy, other times the picture is prudent and carefully composed. “For example, I have made a painting of a still life landscape with a bush. I wanted to paint it like it was a gobelin. It is very prudently and carefully painted. Then you have the painting and drawing ‘Afterparty’ in which a few crushed cans swiftly raise a picture of an event, just like the one with the oversized woman that washes a Trabant. On another occasion, for example in ‘Auto verandert in schilderij’, I put on the paint really thick so that a kind of emulsion arises and things show up from the paint.

The paintings of de Vries in “In Between” are literally and figuratively about interiors and exteriors. About interiors and exteriors and about the relationships between what we see and what we experience. The pale undertones that characterise most of her works comply with the modesty with which Heske de Vries shares the things that are important to her – in her work and beyond- with the spectator.

Collage of text fragments written by H. De Vries en Hakkens

.....The beautiful secret of this airy work is exactly this magical ambivalence between the movements of the hand and the velvet silence of the steering motive. Also remember this : a melody can be sung loud and clear – or she can be hummed. This way, her undulations become mysterious in yet another way. I think you should look at the art of Heske de Vries in this way : with the patient attention for the details of their ambiguity. Keep looking until the thing starts to move before your eyes, unpredictable, like a cloud with its shadow.

Fragment of text written by Rudi Fuchs in catalogue about works of Heske de Vries. Catalogue available in gallery.

"In every drawing or small painting, we see how the movements of the brush are placed around the motif of the image. That’s where its articulation begins as well. It happens in a very circumspect manner — partly because, not infrequently, there exists a certain ambiguity as to what the motif actually is. Is this a volume of some object, or its outline in fact, or when several objects are involved (in a scene) mainly the intervening spaces or even the shadows cast by the objects?
When I look at, and nose about in, the work of Heske de Vries, I see (basically as a manual constant) how the motif is gradually and carefully touched on and explored by the handwriting itself — and by the motion of that manual process. A motif is, in principle, a motionless object (a vase of flowers on a table, a close-up of a floral dress) but there is always suggestive space around it, in all directions. And the brush moves in that space, giving rise to form and color.
Usually the motif is simple or even vague and unsteady in form. It has to be there, since some direction has to be found for the movements of the brush, which might otherwise disappear. This can be compared to a stream, where a stone doesn’t really disrupt the flow of water but does leave a discreetly meandering trace of itself: a motif (every aspect of it) likewise gives the brush a kind of guidance, while at the same time the brush, too, articulates the motif, as though it had never been there entirely from the start or was merely developing.
For it can just as easily be said, on looking at these gentle expressions of intimate observations, that the nimble movements of paint also create the motif in a certain sense; and that in the movement of paint and form, and all the nuances in that space, the motif is discovered as it rises to the surface like a light lily on luminous water. The wonderful secret of this tenuous work is precisely that enchanted ambivalence between movements of the hand and the velvety silence of the floating motif. Think of this too: a melody can be sung loudly and forcefully — or it can be hummed. Then its undulations become differently mysterious. I think that Heske de Vries’s art should be considered in such a manner: with that patient concern for the details of its ambiguity.
Keep on looking until the image begins move before your eyes, unpredictably, as a cloud does with its shadow.

Rudi Fuchs

David Kowalkowski

David Kowalkowski (°1979, B) already exposed together with his former teacher Marcel Berlanger at the gallery. At that time he showed a series of oil paintings featuring a plane tree as subject. It was especially the texture of camouflage of this tree that attracted Kowalkowski. This approach was also the occasion to expose his works at the exhibition “Make-up/Camouflage” together with Eric Angenot and Martijn Schuppers in May 2006. The typical characteristics of colour and shape of the technique of camouflage are clearly present in the ever changing skin structure of the plane tree but they don’t serve the same purpose as the camouflaging in the kingdom of animals or in human warfare, since there they try to mislead the enemy by blending in invisibly with the rest of the environment. On the contrary, the multicoloured scaling make the plane trees stand out in the urban environment.

In his series with the barks of the plane trees, the subject is only an alibi to celebrate the feast of painting in a libertine way. The texture of camouflage gave Kowalkowski the possibility to use all the techniques that the painter has at his disposition. The scaly skin of the plane tree is just an alibi for the displaying of the infinite pictorial possibilities.

The paintings of Kowalkowski that are presently exposed at the gallery are of the same quality as the paintings with the plane trees but start from a different angle. Subject, use of colour, composition, etc…everything is different but painted with that same recognizable virtuosity. The choice of subject still situates itself in the urban environment but is transferred to more intimate, monochrome images wherein a little spider has become the main actor in a setting of domestic flora. The colourful abundance of the scaling has given way to a sober use of colour of blue tones such as were used in old photo prints but with nuances of sepia.

Contrary to the earlier all-over compositions where the plane trees were central, Kowalkowski uses in a more recent series of paintings the little spider that plays an important part, an image dispersion that extends from the exterior to the middle. The context of his story now moves from the border of the picture to the airy space in the middle. Therein floats a spider centrally against a clear ‘background’. The spider web that it is making is at the same time the interior and exterior, it is its border, the demarcation of its domain. The spider has slunk into the image as a parasite of the landscape, of the idyll. It emerges from a dark world and erases feelings of fear and loathing. It nestles in the dreams and fantasies of the depression.

The painting (by Kowalkowski) that is meant to seduce us is disturbed by the spider-ish parasite. It imposes itself upon us. It defines the border between here and there, between front and background. The bright light that draws us as it were from the middle of the canvas from the dark colours at the edges (of the tunnel) to the outside, our desire for the sunlight, is disrupted, prevented by the presence of the spider.

The spider disrupts the seduction until it becomes itself part of the image, until it is one with it. It becomes acceptable in a painterly way, ultimately it makes part of the pictorial seduction. The spider is the artist himself. It is one possible answer to a period of standstill. What is my place in this world, what is my part in the art world, what is the image that I can create ?