As a starting visual artist I have always felt most attracted to the art of painting. Even when I use other media, or if my works take a spatial form, I operate from a painterly process. What makes this medium so interesting is that it is a direct and conceptual medium, whilst it also allows you to work in a very intuitive and experimental manner. This intuition does has to fit within certain conditions, otherwise it would result into a casualness or freedom without making any statements. The selection of works in my archive relate to the history of ideas and visual language of Modernism (Cézanne, Cubism, Mondrian/Malevich, etc.), concrete, and formal art. They are researches for my own medium which have a concrete, formal, sensory and intuitive character.
In 2008-2009 I took abstract or geometric shapes, that I mostly encountered in the public domain, as a starting point. These diverse shapes and patterns were usually the result of a functional intervention such as fences, isolation material, wooden floors, and painted garage doors. Rhythm, the shift of a flat/graphic character or a specific (series) of patterns or shapes, often plays a significant role in the selection process. The starting point was researched in a painterly way. In my early works the brushstroke is in service of the painted shape or rhythm. These are sensed or touched by the paint. The background and the foreground are treated equally. For the series of paintings with the circle I used a cardboard template so that I wouldn’t need to consider the shape during the painting process. In two of the four paintings the brush stroke serves itself rather than the circle. In the other two paintings it’s more about the relationship between paint, carrier, and wall. The latter also applies to the black lacquered work that consists of separate elements.
In the next period 2010-2011 the cardboard template (see above), which at first was not consciously made as an artwork, gave me new insights. I decided to avoid canvas and change it for artificial leather, planking material, transparant platics, fibreglass wallpaper, concrete or linoleum. The outcome of a substantial image had to be a result of a painterly process. By the process, I mean, the acting itself (intuitively and practical/functional), acting that is related to the quality of the material or to the applying of paint or spray paint that relates to the carrier.
Still I kept continuing to be interested in a constructed, substantial and abstract image. I made the carrier myself by gluing prepared strokes of fibreglass wallpaper together or by gluing them on a wooden panel.
Around 2012-2013 I started to draw more on white A4 paper and making collages on the inside of envelopes. The latter gave me the option to work in series. The drawings and collages were meant as studies for paintings. However, I didn‘t succeed to translate them onto canvas. The studies were more interesting and perhaps too finished. Who knows if I might revisit this in the future?
As a result I went searching again for carriers where I could react more directly like with the envelopes. Carriers with grids, lines, or patterns turned out to be quite suitable and effective as something to react to.
