The Weight of 630 Years of Tradition

by Robert Boyd

In 1422, Jan van Eyck, the first great Flemish oil painter, started drawing a salary in the Hague as a painter. From then until the death of Rubens in 1640, Flemish painters were among the best, with Italian artists as their primary competition for greatest-in-the-world status. The tradition of Dutch painting continued through the late 17th and 18th centuries, but those painters are little known outside the Netherlands. The artists from the Dutch Invasion exhibit who spoke at Box 13 on Saturday nonetheless expressed the tradition of Dutch painting as a continuity--particularly painting education, which they implied was quite rigorous. It's hard to know from this show alone whether painting is particularly important within the context of contemporary Dutch art, but if they are at all representative of Dutch art, painting must be a strong current there.

I discussed the Box 13 exhibit in an earlier post. Last Thursday, the second half of the show opened in the Williams Tower gallery.


Christina Bittremieux, untitled, oil on canvas, 2007

Christina Bittrmieux spoke of her work's relationship with landscape. The images are apparently based on real places, even though in the process of being painted, they become quite abstract.One of her subjects is highway exchanges. I don't know if this is one of those piece, but it looks like it could be.


Hans de Bruijn, Monet/Doppelganger, oil on canvas, 2008

Hans de Bruijn seems to carry the weight of his painterly ancestors heaviest. He spoke, for example, of having fallen in love with Mark Rothko's paintings when he was 16 (he is 52 now). He said that ever since he was 17, he had wanted to see the Rothko Chapel, and having built it up in his mind for so many decades, he was disappointed. (A common reaction.) He said those big dark canvases didn't admit him, unlike other Rothko paintings which invite the viewer into the space Rothko has created. De Bruijn considers Rothko a kind of landscape painter--hence his portrait of Rothko on a beach. He then went over to the Cy Twombly gallery without such time-forged expectations and found it overwhelming. (Also a common reaction--Jim Woodring described a similar reaction when he saw them.)


Hans de Bruijn, The Anatomy Lesson (detail), oil on canvas, 2008

Looking at photos of the paintings taken from a distance, it's hard to see just how thick the impasto is on de Bruijn's painting. He really uses the gooey quality of paint as a substance in his paintings.



Anna Bolten

Anna Bolten is the youngest artist of the group. Her paintings are based on photos and usually combine more than one image in a single painting. Something I didn't really notice until she pointed it out is that many of the images are based on photos taken from moving cars or trains. That gives them a slightly blurred look, and they tend to be paired with images taken from a stationary position. The effect is subtle, but visible.


Maarten Demmink, aka Demiak

Demiak's work at Williams Tower included some paintings. In my earlier review, I referred to his work as "painterly" (even though it is composed of photos of carefully created tableaux), and he confirmed that his origins as an artist was as a painter. He spoke of his teenage infatuation with the blues which evolved into a lifelong interest in the deep South (and Louisiana, especially). In fact, while his colleagues are making a pilgrimage to Marfa this week, he and his wife were heading off in the other direction to Lafayette and New Orleans. I mentioned to him that the cypress knees and trees in his photos were utterly gigantic compared to the real things. He didn't apologize--these photos weren't an attempt to create a documentary realism. His Louisiana was a fantastic land, a personal myth. I wonder if seeing the real Louisiana will change his work at all?

A Painterly Show at Box 13: Dutch Invasion

by Robert Boyd

Four of the five artists in Dutch Invasion at Box 13 are painters (Maarten Demmink, aka Demiak, is the odd man out). But it's not enough to say that they are painters. They are very painterly painters. The primary reason for their painting is to be paintings. Paint is the expressive medium. It isn't used ironically. That's kind of refreshing.

When I look at these painters, I think of the painters that came to prominence in the UK in the late 50s and 60s. The big two are Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, but the ones that I see the most echoes of in this show are Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, and Howard Hodgkin (and perhaps a hint of R.B. Kitaj).


Hans de Bruijn, Rothko I, oil on canvas, 2008

This enormous portrait of Mark Rothko by Hans de Bruijn places Rothko in a seascape. De Bruijn states that his portraits of painters try to place them in the environment they painted. I had never thought of Rothko paintings as seascapes, but I can see how that could work. Several other van Bruijn works in the show were also seascapes.

This painting is enormous--6' 7" tall--and the angle that looks up slightly at Rothko's gives it a monumental quality. The thick impasto reminds one of Kossoff and Auerbach. The palette, however, brings to mind certain Rothkos.

I think art that references art history is problematic. It ends up being a circular conversation within a field as opposed to an attempt to speak to the broader culture. De Bruijn sees himself within the painterly Romantic tradition, and his portraits are of artists he identifies as being in that tradition--Caspar David Freidrich, Monet (seems like a stretch to me, but at the same time, one can see him as being a predecessor), Pollock and Rothko. I can't deny I like this painting very much, even if it is art about art.



Christine Bittremieux, Untitled, oil on canvas, 2009

Another painter in the group whose work recalls English painting is Christine Bittremieux. The artist whose work Bittermieux's reminds me of is Howard Hodgkin. Hodgkin's work is reputedly based on real scenes, but I've never quite been able to figure them out. To me, the work feels abstract. Bittremieux writes that her approach is highly formalist, but at the same time her pieces are landscapes. Not actual landscapes, but landscape-like forms arising from the process of laying down brushstrokes. But it's these brushstrokes that remind me of Hodgkins--transparent, filled with not quite mixed paint, the bristles visible.



Anna Bolten, not sure of the title, oil on canvas

Anna Bolten uses photographs to make multipaneled compositions. These paintings seem of all the paintings in the show the most stereotypically Dutch--not because they recall earlier Dutch painting, but because they contain images that are associated with Holland. Cows, flat green landscapes, flowers. I keep expecting to see a windmill. Her adjustments to the photos, softening the edges and departicularizing them, exaggerates the "Dutch-ness" of the subjects. I'm able to fill them in with images of Holland. Now I've been to the Netherlands--I know these stereotypes are just that. But they have a strong hold on the imagination.



Jessica Muller, two paintings, oil on canvas

Jessica Muller seems the least "English" and simultaneously the least "Dutch" of all the painters in the show. Her abstract paintings remind me of abstract expressionist work and its descendents--a style rooted in the U.S. but in some ways universal.But what she does in these two that is interesting is that she underlays the expressionist brushmarks with repeating, hand-painted patterns--hexagons and squares. It's as if she painted them on tiles.



Demiak, Deepwater Horizon 1, inkjet print, 2010

Maarten Demmink (aka Demiak) is the only non-painter in the show. It's funny, though. When I walked into the exhibit and glanced at this work, I thought it was a painting. It was only after taking a longer look did I realize that it was a photograph. As photographs go, it's quite painterly. And Demiak was a painter. He moved on to making super-detailed realistic models, setting them up in dioramas, and photographing them. All the photos in this show deal with the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster--he imagines oil seeping into the swampy backlands (imagine starting from Houma and setting out into the swamp in your bass boat). They are remarkable illusions (although he does make the cypress stumps so huge they look like rock formations).



Demiak,Telephone Poles (from the Call Me series), wood and iron, 2011

His concern with the Deepwater Horizon series is environmental. (Later pictures of the series depict the swamp as a crud-covered post-apocalyptic environment.) But his interest in shacks like this apparently derives from a long-standing interest in the U.S. south.



Demiak, Deepwater Horizon 2, inkjet print, 2010

They are fascinating to look at. There is something about a realistic scale model that appeals to a lot of people (like me). Obviously in popular culture, we think of model train enthusiasts, makers of Revell scale models, or dollhouses. (The interest in scale models as a general category doesn't seem to be limited to either sex.) But until recent decades the art world hasn't really been interested in such things. But with artists like Charles LeDray and the Chapman brothers (and locally, Seth Mittag), the idea of creating scale model tableaux is having its day. A group show of such work would be truly interesting.

When I showed up at this show on the evening of ArtCrawl, there was hardly a soul there. One theory was that it was too far off the beaten path for ArtCrawl, and besides, by 7 pm, art crawlers were pretty exhausted. (I know I was.) Another theory was that because it was not a show of local artists, you didn't have the usual families-and-friends crowd. Well, that's no excuse people! Come see this show. The artists will be visiting and giving a panel discussion on December 10, which would be a good time to check it out.