ART CITIES: London-Robert Zandvliet

Robert Zandvliet is one of the foremost Dutch painters working today, whose work has been on the cusp of abstraction and representation since the early 1990’s. He examines the tension between self-reflective artistic practice and painting bound to a representational function. His pictures arise out of a movement between opposites, a symbiotic relationship between deliberate composition and chance occurrence, abstraction and figuration, part and whole, space and surface, and in which these elements are fused into polyphonic structures that re-envision the history of painting through his own lens. 

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: GRIMM Gallery Archive

For his solo exhibition “Pink Moon” Robert  Zandvliet has developed a series of imagined landscapes that break down the archetype of his subject – a heather field, a moonrise, a melting snowscape, willow and dogwood trees. These motifs echo art historical fragments, captured with an economic and gestural brushstroke and combination of mediums that highlight the abstraction of the landscape into shape, form, light and shadow. The compositions balance the immediacy of the viewer’s experience with the slower resolution of the influence, ideas and history that underline the world of Zandvliet’s painting. His minimal approach shifts and merges foreground and background, subject and negative space, to reorient the viewer’s perception of depth and surface. Though nature acts as a catalyst for Zandvliet’s painting, the artist resists the impulse to translate the natural world through a realistic perspective. Instead, he deconstructs the elements of nature to their essence, seeking to capture what he describes as ‘an idea of landscape’. The resulting works fuse abstract and representational elements to reframe our perspective of the natural world. For “Pink Moon”, Zandvliet has experimented with scale and texture, adding oil to his egg tempera works to animate the surface of the painting and create a vibrancy unique to the work, and even introducing textiles into his practice to test the boundaries of what a painting can mean. A dialogue between the paintings begins with the titular “Pink Moon” (2024) capturing a glowing moonrise using a combination of acrylic rolled rhythmically across the raw linen canvas with deep opaque Van Dyke brown oil paint; a technique echoed in the adjacent “Schneesmeltze” (2024). This piece references Swiss Impressionist Cuno Amiet’s “Melting Snow” of 1904, as moonlight reflects off the luminous pools of thawing ice on the canvas. The sharp vertical motions streaking the surface of the painting with impasto oil conjure a dense thicket around the bulbous willow trees on the horizon. These vigorous vertical gestures occur throughout the series – evolved from early experiments in capturing the motion of movement through ice and grass using tools such as the imprint of a large spalter brush or edge of a piece of card – and can be found throughout the exhibition in works from “Unitled” (2018) to the vast textile piece “Heather” (2024). Created in collaboration with textile specialist Karin Zeedijk, Zandvliet refers to the piece as a painting that continues his investigation into colour that began with his series “Le Corps de la Couleur” (2022) in which he sought to investigate the essence of colour itself. The work captures the distinct grey/lavender shade of heather and its gradual fade from richer earthen tones to sheer, mistlike greys, punctuated with vibrant spots of purples, pinks, greens and yellows. Referencing the etymological branches of the word ‘heather’ which includes a technique of blending multiple colored fibers to create a softer and more complex textile, the piece was built from a full-size sketch, transposing Zandvliet’s signature painting style into a thickly tufted textile work.

Photo: Robert Zandvliet, Untitled, 2022, Egg tempera and oil on linen, 63.5 x 72.5 cm | 25 x 28 1/2 in, © Robert Zandvliet, Courtesy the artist and GRIMM Gallery

Info: GRIMM Gallery, 2 Bourdon Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 11/4-25/5/2024, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 11:00-18:00, https://grimmgallery.com/