Koen van den Broek

Text

Koen van den Broek has observed that ‘with just a few lines a space can be created’. In his paintings this space describes both the so-called ‘real’ world, and a more conceptual one – an empty highway, a deserted snow-bound village, or the abstraction born of a concrete stain on the corner of a big, anonymous town. Seemingly straightforward objects or landmarks – a red pipe, a footpath, bridge, barn or a truck for example – are painted with a blunt, descriptive clarity. Suddenly, however, the focus might, without warning, veer away from the big picture and hurtle into the details of a composition so skewed it takes a minute to recognize its provenance.
Some of van den Broek’s paintings evoke the idea of abstraction, but it’s an abstraction kept in check by the titles, which often allude to an object, place or piece of architecture – Twin Towers or Barrel, for example – and pull the images back into the so-called ‘real’ world. Van den Broek is obviously enamoured of emptiness, be it the emptiness of a desert or a skyscraper’s façade. Everything non-essential in these images has been stripped away and as a result, despite their often crisp edges and cool light, some of the paintings appear close to dissolving. In Twin Peaks, for example, the scene is achingly ambiguous – a pink slope, a yellow curve, a smudge of green. In Zion a brown road with a yellow line snakes into the distance yet it is so reduced I wonder how we read it as a recognizable scene. Details are absorbed by great swathes of colour while hard lines split logic of recognition in two and extreme shifts in perspective engender disorientation. (Lines split reality in two; yet once you start looking, the question of whether they bind or divide becomes irrelevant.) In Broken Yellow Border, for example, it is initially hard to gauge the scale – it’s an image which simultaneously evokes a flight over a mountain range and the concrete blocks that demarcate bicycle lanes. This tension, or blurring, between conventional ideas about what is abstract and what is not makes sense: it is a confusion that the world itself has created. The geometry and colours of our lives don’t always, if observed isolated from the whole, create something immediately or obviously coherent. After all, lines and volume are as integral to a chair, a house or a telegraph pole as they are to a painting by Barnett Newman or Henri Matisse. Van den Broek’s is a flattened, near Pop sensibility that owes as much to Alex Katz as Piet Mondrian, both artists who have made it clear how interchangeable such definitions can be.
In the more obviously ‘realistic’ paintings, everyone has left. All that remains is paint and support; a single frame narrative of a journey, a town, a shadow or that ultimate monochrome, the birdless sky. (Every painting you’ve ever seen alludes, to a certain extent, to travelling; into someone else’s mind, or a conceptual framework, or a culture that is not necessarily yours.) The recurring feeling is a forlorn one: in both the cities and countryside that van den Broek paints, a lack of centre dominates: this is existence – and possibly perception – at the periphery. In the more abstracted paintings images rear up in front of you until details fade to the point of disappearance; what remains is a reduction or approximation that would, conversely, seem to delight in its expansiveness – even the most concentrated of paintings are full of space. The artist’s intense focus functions like a microscope, examining a place where the ‘real’ is rendered invisible, subsumed by the constituents of its sum parts.
Borders, both literally and figuratively, dominate van den Broek’s paintings: from the dynamic edge of the paintings to the artist’s preoccupation with gutters, bridges and viaducts to the corners of buildings or the angle of a disappearing road slicing through a vivid coldness both of feeling and of climate. These are images which seem to be holding their breath: an empty truck in an empty expanse; a horse turned away in a snowy landscape – everything is still. Something, as in life, is either about to happen or just has. (Painting as a pause, as an anticipation.)
These paintings have a mixed relationship to photography. During the course of his many travels van den Broek takes rolls and rolls of photographs which he uses as source material for his paintings; he never uses ‘found’ photographs or ones taken by someone else. All of which begs the question: why then, aren’t the photographs enough? What does the translation into paint offer the original image? It seems obvious to state: the marks of the paint brush emanate a different energy, a different meaning, to a photographic print. Each painting is unique, even as it describes a generic scene. This has as much to do with the materials of paint as about the history of painting – unlike a photograph, a painting cannot be reproduced, or repeated – the transformation (and translation) that takes place between the initial scene, the photograph of it and the painting is different every time – paintings are less about the veracity of the moment than the veracity of the mark. Look closely at the buildings or objects in these paintings and they begin to wobble – van den Broek is more interested in atmospheric possibilities of paint than in photorealism. (Like Matisse’s painting of his wife, van den Broek makes it clear: these are not buildings, they are paintings. The photograph’s relationship to reality is very different – someone or something was there at a certain moment in time and they did look like this. A painting only ever resembles itself.)
The climate of these paintings is cool and occasionally cold, as precise and sparse as polished metal, despite the fact that much of what is pictured here is organic; the sky, earth, a shadow. A viaduct or a road might be powerful things, but nothing is more powerful than the sky and nothing is more minimal. (Nature understands minimalism.) This is one of the many paradoxes of these paintings. They can look abstract while they resist it at every turn; are preoccupied with absence but can only convey it through presence; are introspective even as they look out, and, despite the their sense of containment, are curiously open-ended – colourful images of desolation that, although devoid of people evoke humanity via the places people live, or travel through or gaze at. Light and bleakness go hand in hand here. The colours too – yellows, granitey greens, pinks, blues and greys – although bright and clear, evoke a kind of high-keyed melancholy.
Van den Broek’s paintings revel both in the solitary experience of the painter and in the solitude – and mysterious process – of looking at, and engaging with paintings. Despite the weight of history and precedence, ultimately the only person present in this interaction is the viewer looking into the picture, and the painter who has, in a sense, built the window. Van den Broek has created paintings of strange depth: a depth built from something that is purely surface: pigment and medium on a surface.

Jennifer Higgie is co-editor of Frieze

First published in Higgie, Jennifer. Koen van den Broek. Jay Jopling / White Cube, London 2003

More on Koen van den Broek

	Related Texts
CV
Bibliography

Back to Koen van den Broek

• Terms & Conditions
• |
• Copyright Information
• |
• Privacy Policy
• |
• Sitemap