In the In-Between   

In the 17th century, the Golden Age when the Dutch experienced an unprecedented flowering of commerce and culture, the Dutch landscape was deemed worthy of pictorial representation. Instead of symbolic depictions of Italian idylls, which primarily served as settings and backdrops for biblical scenes, the nature outside the window shifted into the focus of the artist and rivers, banksides and fields became scenes and subjects in their own right. However, another 200 years would pass until the artist’s studio penetrated nature, until “plein air” painting was made possible by the invention of paint in tubes. The three painters from Holland brought together in the exhibition “In the In Between” have naturally internalized these artistic traditions. A contemporary form of landscape painting is not possible without an awareness of its development.   

How can nature be captured in paintings? This is the question explored in Han Klinkhamer’s paintings. His work begins “plein air”, in nature, with the sight of the dyke in front of his studio on the river Meuse. However, this first encounter does not serve as an act of recording, which is then committed to canvas in his studio, instead it serves more as an attunement and idea. His paintings depict nature, including landscapes, but more as a fragment, a detail, as an excerpt rather than a panorama. In the encrusted, relief-like layers of paint the blades of grass and flower stems look as if they have been pressed into the wet paint and conserved. Motif and surface are inseparably linked. In fact the artist, in an almost sculptural moment within the painting, scratches the stems and grasses into the base paint after applying numerous monochrome layers. As a result, the surface itself looks like a natural surface, like a furrowed field, dry moss, or the bark of a tree. By partly smearing the layers of paint in the background, he lends his paintings an element of movement. A fleeting instant, a brief glance at the weeds at the wayside, which are just as worthy of a place in our visual memory as a beautiful, complete landscape.

    The impression of an instant also characterizes the paintings of Marc Mulders. His virtuoso paintings, teeming with the movement of the brush and the paint, are impulsive renditions of nature in action, as Mulders observes it every day directly in front of his studio. His working space is in an old stable in the middle of flowering meadows and fields which present a different natural spectacle each season. In his pictures it is as if one can feel the humming of the bees, the rustling of the leaves in the wind, the scent, the layering, juxtapositions and disorder of nature with all one’s senses. From the swirls of paints, initially completely abstract, here and there bodies and forms emerge, which are amplified by the pictures’ associative titles. Thus the Flower Skull, a vague image of a face, emerges from the confusion of flecks of paint, while one has to search longer for the Green Man in the work of the same name. Everyone sees something different in nature, whether in cloud formations or seas of flowers. Mulders’s paintings openly proclaims their Impressionist borrowings and inspiration. In his own private Giverny - a title he gave to a past exhibition, not without a humorous undertone – he enters into a dialog with the great modernist masters - and the masters of nature.    

In the case of Reinud van Vught, nature and the forms she gives rise to serve more as an impulse than a trigger for a painterly process which takes place in every picture. It may begin with a single dab of paint, a form which looks like a petal, without aspiring to imitate anything previously seen. Deliberations on the composition of colours and forms within pictorial spaces go hand in hand with chance moments and elements of surprise, when the background areas painted in watercolours take on form and spread through the picture space as if the plants were growing within the pictures. When van Vught switches from the small-format watercolours to the large paper and canvas works, the opposite process takes place within the picture, as if he were subjecting his motifs, reminiscent of plants, to a microscopic examination, elaborating their details. Hatched, striped, geometrically patterned areas of paint are superimposed upon each other, foreground and background dissipate, transparent and opaque elements alternate. However, these graphic forms can also be traced back to nature, to the geometry which can be found in stems, leaf veins, seeds, or cones.   

As different as the approaches and the handling of nature, and the subsequent results may be - Han Klinkhamer, Marc Mulders, and Reinoud van Vught encounter one another in an intermediate space between nature and landscape, between form and surface, abstraction and figuration, memory and construction. In the in Between.