Zundert, Saturday February 17th 2018
De schoonheid van een autoachterwerk kunnen waardeeren zal dreigende vertwijfeling voorkomen bij professionele bestuurders.
Muurinstallatie voor aan de muur (ca. 300 x 500 cm), bestaande uit (ca.) 10 afbeeldingen (100 x 80 cm), olie / doek, 2018, Zundert.
De 9 afbeeldingen zijn zonder waterpas opgehangen, ongelijkmatig uitgelijnd, zoals auto’s op een parkeerplaats, met rijstrook om in en uit te rijden.
“I made this plan to paint backsides of (mostly) NL-cars when driving 1150 kms on highway from Brussels to Vienna on december 23rd 2017 (and not as a professional driver to deliver wines, as I claim within the tile of the installation), as a project for Zundert. The back of a car is a strong and memorable image of our time; everybody sees this every day many times, it is contemporary. And it has something stricktly personal and identifiable. Painting obsessively very similar or even equal images is a job, that artists do sometimes to reach a formal freedom and at the same time spirituality by the independence of creating without mental effort. Art history does not speak too much about this. One speaks about The Sunflowers or Les Meules, and an image appears in one’s mind.
When, some weeks later, I visited an exhibition of collegues and friends of mine in Brussels, I felt a strong attraction by their whole presentation – with a certain uncomfortable feeling about it. On one hand there was clearly a formal repetition visible (as I intended to do in Zundert), on the other hand it was probably the result of a commercial trap of the artmarket. To get to the point of my doubts I contacted the gallery to ask for the price(es). Every single and separately shown piece was Eur 8.500 VAT excl., but they would have agreed a discount, because of our long-term companionship. I answered, that I would only be interested in buying the whole installation or nothing, but ther was a no way answer: because of their success the artist duo had already sold several works of this exhibition separately.From my point of view it is a shame to sell this exhibition piece by piece. This is a violation of it’s intellectual integrity, because reading the leaflet to every single piece only makes sense for the artwork as an installation. Otherwise this exhibition gets very problematic in the sense of overproduction because of commercial and not artistic values.
When painting his various sunflower paintings Van Gogh did not have the problem of choosing the same or different prices for these kinds of works. Having all this in mind I decided to sign these paintings with the diminutive form of my first name, and to refuse to separate them or to hang them separately one by one. It is an installation and its form Parking Place corresponds amusingly to its subject(s)”.
