Santa Fe, NM – For more than 35 years, Dirk de Bruycker has been creating Beautifully engaging canvases from painterly florescences of vibrant color floating on intimations of patterned form drawn in asphaltum. This unique approach to composition has helped make de Bruycker’s work widely regarded for its sense of mystery and intrigue that comes from blending penumbras of dense hue, drawn pattern, and luminous translucent wash stained onto canvas. These elements combine to form graceful effusions of powerful emotional expression in which de Bruycker’s viscerally executant hand always is evident.
De Bruycker’s signature form of color field painting converges veils of vaporous color with subtle tinges of sepia stain to produce forms that appear to float elegantly in atmospheres of silent contemplation and enigmatic sensuality. In his first exhibition of new work since joining LewAllen Galleries, de Bruycker has created a body of large brooding paintings that suggest entropic ideas of struggle and conflict while capturing a magnificent sense of the sublime resident in the artist’s notions of the beautiful. About this de Bruycker says: “Throughout the years I have searched for a tactile but fragile beauty, a kind of dangerous beauty, a fleeting one. This tragic (kind of) beauty interests me.”
The internal Sturm und Drang of colliding masses of oil color and under-painted intimations of form and pattern rendered in asphaltum also function to ignite personal associations and memories, like enormous, brilliantly colored Rorschachs. The paintings plumb the universality of emotional aesthetics while retaining the possibility for intimate personal meaning and response.
The LewAllen exhibition of new work by de Bruycker opens at the gallery’s location in the Railyard Arts District on Friday, September 26. The artist describes his title choice for the show: “Logos is a Greek word for non-mathematical, non-scientific, non-linear order, rather an intuitive, subjective, and complex order, but nevertheless an order.” The lingering order in de Bruycker’s organic works grounds their perceptive nature to the tangible, the more fathomable.
De Bruycker instinctively navigates the production of his process-driven work, cultivating organic emblems of what he describes as a “dangerous beauty.” Yet his paintings remain intuitively, rather than conceptually, driven.
Often aligned with such color -field greats as Helen Frankenthaler and Mark Rothko -- particularly in his practice of Rothko’s words “only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless” --de Bruycker’s complex mix of unusual materials differentiates his work, producing especially ethereal yet deeply emotional effects.
Like his process, which reveals underpinnings of asphalt, successive layers of liquid color, and images of watermarks and mandalas, his oeuvre recalls the many influences of his worldly life. Born in Ghent, Belgium, de Bruycker currently divides his time between Nicaragua and New Mexico, and he admits that the sensuality and intensity of Latin American life have crept into his cooler Northern European sensibilities making his paintings “much brighter, with more color, less melancholic and conceptual, more overtly intuitive.”
De Bruycker received his MA from the St. Lucas Institute of Visual Arts in 1977 and attended the Graduate Program Printmaking Department at the University of New Mexico from 1980 -81. A recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Visual Artist Fellowship Grant in 1989, he has been awarded numerous other accolades. De Bruycker’s work is included in many important public and private collections throughout the U.S. and Europe.
