Five Dutchies in New York
By Karen Swikata
The small show "Five Dutchies in New York" opened to a warm and festive reception Feb. 5, at the Broadway Gallery, located at 473 Broadway in SoHo. The show highlighted pieces by five Dutch artists—Aryen Hart, Gerda van Leeuwen, Paulien Lethen, Yvonne Simons and Gabriel Stillwater—all are living or showing or around New York. The show’s curator, Winand Staring, had his own work on display in "Abstraction in the Elements On a Water Note," a show that complements the "Five Dutchies" rather well. Both tackled concepts of the familiar and finite, at times meeting the unknown and becoming broken down into something more indefinite and universal.
All six pieces in "Five Dutchies" command the observer’s attention in the smaller room in the back of Broadway Gallery. Gerda van Leeuwen’s Blue Out is an easel-sized painting on canvas placed on the windowed wall of the gallery’s back room, reminiscent of the Abstract Expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler, mostly because of the prominent element of sea blue paint carefully and deliberately poured over the canvas. This method relys on the absorbency of the canvas to create spontaneous bursts of color. In Blue Out, the viewer can see the weave and weft of the unprimed canvas beneath the blue paint spotted with metallic hues of earthy copper, oxidized black, and pale blue silver. The pouring method creates a visual record of a process guided by the subconscious, the unseen made tangible with paint.
On the same wall of the gallery’s backroom hangs an oil painting by Gabriel Stillwater, The Imitation of Forever. Holland Art House’s Ben Gall, who represents Stillwater, was on hand at the opening and explained that the image is actually a high-quality digital photograph printed in black and white on canvas and then painted over by Stillwater. He paints the natural elements: stones and the cloud-filled sky. The photograph is of a nude female model lying prostrate on a wooden floor. The ceiling lines of the room are faintly visible in the sky, as are the floorboards where that sky meets the horizon. Stillwater’s painted detail, such as the meticulous delineation of each strand of the model’s hair, is striking. "The painting is an image of forever," Gall said. The idea here is similar to Ren� Magritte’s 1928-9 Treachery of Images, a painting of a realistically rendered pipe with script at the bottom that says Ceci n’est pas une pipe—"This is not a pipe." Of course it’s not a pipe, it’s the image of a pipe. Stillwater applies the same idea to The Imitation of Forever, his painting is an image, a finite and material representation of the abstract, intangible idea of forever.
Another Holland Art House artist, Arjen van den Eerenbeemt, better known as Aryen Hart, contributes a dramatic piece. Gall explains that Hart’s unique technique in Homeostasis I, scratches a sizable piece of aluminum and then brandishes it. The metal is then painted with pigments and three layers of polyurethane are applied in an automotive body shop. The result is a deep, reflective surface finish that entices the viewer with the many hues and layers. The distressed metal is the perfect backdrop to allow for the play of light through the applied colors. A brilliant blaze of orange peeks like a sunrise directly over a black rectangle along the bottom of the piece. The blue appears almost black along the edges, briefly interrupted by a single thin rectangle of silver, then fading to silver around the orange burst at center. The contrast of extreme light and the deepest dark is stunning. Gall explains that Hart often titles his pieces to reflect the spiritual message of his work. Homeostasis I, like the other pieces in the room, reflects a state of contemplative thought: homeostasis is the quality or tendency of a living thing to move toward equilibrium. Hart’s techniques are a successful use of an industrial medium to create artistic expression.
A painting by Yvonne Simons, Putting a Spell On You, makes remarkable use of color. A figurative abstraction of several nudes reclining and upright female models, it is reminiscent of Pablo Picasso’s groundbreaking Les Demoiselles d’Avignon from 1907. Simon’s palette includes orange, from the palest tints to the strongest shades, with dashes of red and yellow, all softly blended, but each holding its own. Patches of blue turn grey where they mix with orange, balancing the composition perfectly. The color combination animates their dancing bodies. Although some might think that these are unusual colors for a nude, the results are pleasantly surprising and pleasing.
The final artist, Paulien Lethen, contributes two works to the show. Lethen owns the Holland Tunnel art gallery, one of the most established in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Both pieces are untitled with metal frames about six inches thick. They are reminiscent of the color field painter Mark Rothko’s large canvases with color blocks that convey a sense of spirituality and nature. The scale, however, is much smaller than Rothko’s. Lethen’s technique also suggests the style of painter Doug Ohlson, with color blocks highlighted by gestured paint strokes. In one piece, the paint strokes are horizontal, with salmon-orange applied over black, brushed thickly over a pale blue. In the other, the planes of color are created from vertical brush strokes, with black swept over a splash of mustard yellow in the upper left-hand corner, and the same pale blue covering the rest of the small canvas. Both could be abstractions of a landscape or expressive pieces guided from the subconscious.
Winand Staring’s own works in the adjoining gallery are equally fascinating. Water is vital to the human experience—it is a means of life, death, transportation, communication, agriculture, recreation, war, fortune, and ruin. Much of Staring’s paintings look like meteorological views of water masses. Mixtures of calm and fury with brilliant colors, they are at once consuming and meditative. The masking tape lines in some canvasses, such as Furious Water and On a Water Note, suggest boundaries and limitations of water’s ownership. Water Wish, a canvas awash in gentle blue and green hues, is fresh and soothing, more spiritual that any Monet water lily painting.
The show’s mix of abstraction and figuration, of pale calming colors and strong oranges, leaves its viewers caught in artistic fervor and meditation. Once our visual nerves our wrought, there is plenty of opportunity for soothing contemplations. These five Dutchies have traveled quite far from their homeland and the traditions of Dutch still life paintings.
