Kill Your Darlings (text originally written in Dutch)
Visual terror, connections, extraction and insertion, leading and misleading, front/back/in/out/along... are some of the summaries defining my paintings. After a period of fundamental examining the art of my painting, the idea of resourcing was born. A dramatic stylistic change is imperative. An experienced spectator will remark that I did not completely drift away from my initial painting style. What initally was present in my paintings still has a hidden presence. Weightlessness, gravity, mass, scantiness, compression, gloss, transparancy, dimming, heat, incandescence, fusion, dynamics, mutilation, rythm and structure still are present. My art of painting is not conceptual nor do I work with contemporary motifs. I paint abstract, whitout working with fixed colours or putting in signafication. The approach of my paintings comes through the memory. The variation in formats is part of my “pictural language”. Each format requires an individual painting character: the working of a radiation point a surface, or the dynamics of a line have a different effect depending on the size.
Under the device “Kill your darlings” I take a distance from my great examples in the history of art ( Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Ido Bar-El, Raoul De Keyser). In a wilful way I built a (re-) new (-ing) work, and exactly know where to go to. One can put that, after experementing and researching, I conquered my own place/ identity in the history of art. By painting I discover the painting. A painting is not born without pain, and gives a feeling of conquest. The next step is not always known to me, but I am being lead by the painting process. The paint mainly introduces itself. When focusing on my paintings, one experience rustle, visual terrror, rapid eye movement. The eye walks around in the painting, is not fixed upon one point. Watching from a distance, shows a lisible, rhytmic structure, silence.In this way my paintings are twofold, and I force the spectator to a particular way of watching. I invite the spectator to decompose the structures of the canvas and the appliance of the paint. Each touch leaves its traces. Which does not mean that my paintings can be understood by everybody. A piece of art can also exist without a spectator. I want to create paintings that can be called art without being understood by somebody. It is my opinion that a painting should exist by itself, without the necessary explanation. This is in contrary with the actual standards of the art of painting, but this does not worry me. To me, the conception and the growing of a picture is more relevant than the presentation. Inmesureable. Impossible to remember. Not representable. Distortion. Visual terror. Silence. I just want to do my thing. What I paint is what I want to paint. I do not want to oppose or to join some expressions of art. My work generally is defined as abstract. Most important to me is the skin of paint and the layering of paints. I paint what cannot be touched. At the end my pictures grow abstract by keeping on working at them, by painting. A painting catches you, figurative or abstract is not that important to me. I understand figuration and abstraction in art not as a dichotomy. My work has a certain entity, a certain movement amplifying from one work to another.
My art of painting has a solide base with the running paint on top and along and stops and is taken onto the next painting. And that is why I work with several paintings. One painting follows the other. No chronicle order, my work is like a growing snowball. One painting starts another. “A never ending story/ journey”. I dare to pose that I am an actual, radical painter. This shows by continuous change and complexaty of forms and non-forms. My work is never finished. It is presented in its incompleteness. Therefrom the feeling of endlessness in my paintings.