EXCURSIONS

The series of paintings titled ‘Excursions’ can be considered as the memory or the thought of a walk through a natural landscape. This unfolds over time, potentially spanning multiple scattered visits to the same location, and thus multiple seasons. The thought bundles all impressions into one single image that encompasses everything and simultaneously holds within it the beginning to reproduce the walk over time.

The act of painting can be seen as the search for that one impression, where all the separate elements that were important for that place and that day—things like light, temperature, sound, atmosphere, details—move over one another like grids. The multitude of grids blurs the view of the individual aspects of the walk and overwhelms the senses. The recognisability of the separate landscape elements becomes less important; their complexity leads to abstraction. The viewer is absorbed in this stacking of perspective, time, and light, and makes the walk back from abstraction themselves by deciphering and unravelling the different layers, like an excursion through the painterly landscape.

VEGETATIVE SPACE

The series ‘Vegetative Space’ departs from the same concept but results in a rather abstract spatial interplay of patches that come very close to the spatial experience of standing in the middle of a natural landscape, surrounded by plants and trees, rather than surveying the landscape as a structured space from a distance.