analogue and digital figurative art full of imagination
analogue and digital figurative art full of imagination
acrylic on watercolor paper (8 x 100 x 150 cm, 2020)
painting time
Elusive time
Hourglass measures time; the clock is not the time; the (peeled) lemon is the symbol for the passage of time. The forced scanning of the painted space with the eye makes you feel the passage of time, aims at a sense of time.
The cross section of the lemon is a dial drawn by the white membranes that keep the succulent cells together in compartments. The number of segments, of the hours of a day, varies in the lemon dial from eight to twelve, usually ten.
For time measurement we still use the duodecimal system, for both hours and months, and we have separate words for the first twelve numbers. The painted hexagons refer to the sixty seconds in a minute and sixty minutes in the hour.
Time and space
Different time
Time is not the same everywhere, just as space is different everywhere. Life is wrestling with time and space, trying to escape impermanence. Movement takes time, without time no movement; sportingly we kill time, the minds full of transience, the mystery of space and time.
The stratification of space, such as the spatial division into layers in the Earth’s crust, says something about time. Usually the oldest layers are on the bottom. The Precambrian lies below the Cambrian, the Devonian below the Carboniferous. The course of time can therefore be seen in the structure of space. Layers are sequence, sequence is time.
Curved space and time
Incomprehensible time
From a distance, powerless and amazed looking at the peeled lemon, at the strange characteristics of time; looking back at the past, at the passing of time. There are multiple realities with their own passage of time, memories are like networks of hexagonal chicken wire with increasingly widening meshes.
Here, the most normal is the framed painted painting. The entire painting without a frame continues into the space in which it is hung and is therefore closer to reality than the painting of the man who looks at time, in amazement, at its transience, powerless from his own demarcated, framed world.
Time is repetition
Elapsed time
The nostalgia of the watch that is open and reflects a distorted time. The antique watch in futuristic space. Curvature of space. Killing time. Lemons as heavy as lead in a net until it’s full?
Repetition of actions, such as filling a net, is a way of making time visible. This repeating element, that pleasant ticking of the clock, is also present in the tessellations.
In this work you see no rapid restless movement, no sketchy search for shapes, no throwing paint. It is more thoughtfully at a leisurely pace, with regularity like the ticking of the clock, steadily building up.
Time and digital space
Imperative time
The weight of this juncture is contemporary wrestling with the weight of time. Time management is biting the sour bullet, looking for the balance between lack of time and enough time.
In addition to the physical space of the paintings, we now have the digital space that changes much faster and has a different perception of time.
Balancing with the available time is a tough job that has penetrated more and more into our personal life. These daily tour de force takes a big bite out of the time available to us.
The time of painting
Grueling time
Time is squeezed; we are lived by time; we have to accept the irrevocability of time; man changes with time, the clock is a robot; robots increasingly determine our time schedule.There is a kernel, a seed that could still germinate.
The painter and the viewer have a different time frame. The painter starts with an empty paper and thinks about the future, about the future painting. The painting grows in the future. When the painting is finished, the viewer sees the past, the result of painting in the past.
Frozen time
Changing time
Traces of the distant past and a look at the unimaginable strangeness of the future. Mirror of transience, remnants of classical antiquity thousands of years old, and genetically engineered lemons in the future.
There are threads from past to future; the world is not a straight line but layered, unpredictable, intricately curved and rectangularly simple. From what has been handed down from ancient Egypt we know that there was already a culture of beautifying, of hairstyles and make-up, even beyond death.
The mirror still plays an important role. We see the passage of time in our appearance. The organically shaped lemons on the right show how we try to slow down the passage of time by manipulating our outer shapes.
On the way to the future
Waiting time.
Generations waiting, looking to the future. Waiting lasts, the new world is slowly approaching, step forward, step back. Which world is the real one? The painting within a painting or the painting? The past, present or future? Is everything as straightforward as we tend to think?
Waiting for the snail. We are all waiting for the passage of time. We have an amount of impermanence in a net, some more than others, time is in our heads and we have no influence on time, on what is to come. We don’t know how long we have to wait.
