Heske de Vries
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.
Rudy Fuchs