IN THIS LIGHT..., WHISPER, 24

June 13th, 2006, a date randomly picked, a collection of newspapers are bought. When coming across images on their pages, they are cut out and filed under the date of the day.

These images are then hung on the walls of the studio and a selection process takes place. The selection process is not much more then a response to the lay-out of the information in the images, e.g. distribution of lights and darks, balance between objects and people occupying them, etc. Their content at this point is being ignored.

I start painting the images one by one. What at first is mainly a technical exercise, quickly becomes an engagement with the 'actual' situation presented to me.

I am painting a soldier in a desert, nameless. All what is identified is his nationality and his location.

A girl being rushed into a hospital, her hands covered in blood, frightened. Normally I would read the captioning and move on. Now, however I spend more time with her. I am painting her hair and it is then that I realize that not too long ago, maybe hours before the ‘event’ her mother might have braided this thick, black hair. From the information I have read I know her mom will never be able to do this again.

I come across images of people described as insurgence and a mention of their nationality, no other description given. Persons are being categorized and abstracted by the caption, the language used. A number gives the score of the dead, even further abstracted. A system of classification starts to take place. A value is attached the words describing an event. Described one way a life has value, classified another way it loses value and this way of description can be used for many, including political, reasons.

Painting these people doesn't give me more knowledge about them. However in the process of painting I start to see them as less abstract. I can no longer see them as disconnected entities, but start seeing them as some ones farther, mother, daughter, son.

Colour fields are laid around the source image. The images are first of all subject to a general lay-out. Addressing if and if so at what stage in the editing process, the general lay-out of a page in the newspaper or on the canvas becomes superior to its content.

The editor makes choices to what we are exposed and how we are exposed to it, maybe there are some parallels to how we 'read' the information presented to us.

The photographs have been translated ( have been materialized ) into paint. The content is now within a gallery setting and instead of quickly passing the information by, as when we are exposed to these images in the news media, has become less of an option.

Does the 'denial' of the content reach into the gallery setting, is the audience really looking at the content or are they mainly concerned with the material execution of the paintings? What does it mean to really look at an image?

Does art itself get labeled in order to categorize it and become therefore, by being subjected to a linguistic system, more or less valuable?

Painting and the Act of Communication

My work as a painter has revolved around the questioning of the communicative possibilities of painting. By exploring and experimenting with materials, subject matter and conceptualization, i try to question the acceptance of painting as a visual, communicative tool. Graphic use of images related to world events and world history, different techniques dealing with the materiality of paint, use of categorizable styles such as landscape painting, abstraction and the use of narrative all form part of this investigation. A painting is first and foremost an abstraction, a formalized visual, and when no longer in sight anymore, capable of becoming a pure mental image. The memory of the work lingers on and can, overtime reshape the first impression to become a fully altered ‘ after image ‘ of the first encounter. I try to engage this process in my painting practice. For me paint is both materiality and ghost like lingering. I engage in transforming suspended pigment into a reactionary statement. A statement informed by the world around me, its politics, its forgetting. A statement informed as well by Art history, emotion and the daily bombardment of ‘other’ visuals.

Selected Views and Random Acts
Notes on the work of Jeroen Witvliet by John Tippet

Here we have an artist investigating once more the meaning and relevancy of the chosen medium. At first glance we are presented with works which seem to be concerned with their possible narrative and investigative power. In this they are solidly placed within the contemporary world of the “politics of the visual “ . Brush strokes are left to be nothing more then brushstrokes, an exposing of the material quality of which the paintings are made . In this the mark is left hovering between the honesty of being nothing else and at the same time being part of the painter’s arsenal to re-create the visible world by interpretation.
These works are emphasizing the painter’s emotional response to the place he finds himself in, while at the same time they are densely layered, philosophical essays on the current state of ( art ) world affairs.

The artist is taking a chance by leaving the works where they are , shimmering and floating in and out of the minds eye. The work is balancing on a fine line between exposing too much or too little. It raises questions not only about the medium and the decision to present these paintings to us as they are but also about the honesty of the work towards what it investigates.

The question is, can a painting be a document of its time when it has to not only respond to the artist’s folly and his or her awareness of being caught in a contemporary visual battle and at the same time investigate the state of humanity at the beginning of the 21ste. Century in all honesty ?
The arts and the artists have developed such an awareness of being that it seems to be impossible to construct visuals which are not investigations into the artificiality of the fabricated / constructed visual which they ( the artists ) are themselves producing.

In the work of this painter there is the awareness of being a cultural image maker , attempting to expose the construct of society. While at the same time the struggle of finding an honest response at the beginning of a new millennium reflects through the density of painterly information.

On TRACES SERIES
Vestiges, Nanaimo Art Gallery 2003
Roy Green 2003

Jeroen Witvliet’s stark, subdued and elegant paintings are ambiguous sites of paradox and revelation. They evoke slippery feelings of events too distant or disturbing to accurately remember. The silvery grey surfaces do not refer to any specific landscape or event however. The artist sees the images presented here as being strictly defined as a collection of materials contained on the canvas. The viewer’s task is to complete the meaning for each of these works, based upon their own personal history or experience. These empty spaces may evoke the desolation of a clear-cut forest on a dank west coast morning, or the blank winter sky of days long past, monochrome photos that have documented forgotten dreams, a dead-end vantage point where there are only ghostly remains of previous human endeavour. But i do not think of these paintings as being excessively bleak, as a cool sense of calmness prevails despite the dense blackness of the foreboding horizon. These paintings are like liminal zones of perception and memory, a permeable membrane for the collection and releasing of visual experience.
Geometric squares and rectangular bars function as a kind of personal code that adds to the perceptual complexity of these works.

These pictorial elements remind us that we are not really looking out of the window of these paintings into a bucolic landscape we can inhabit, but challenge our pre-conceptions of what a painting is and what it can do . These poignant and silent works are like counter-memorials to the past, offering no easy solutions or answers except the one the viewer must supply in the quest for meaning.

On EVENT HORIZON
Roy Green October 2004

Jeroen Witvliet’s multi-panel pieces are comprised of poured and pooled, scraped, brushed and manipulated layers of silver and black metallic industrial marine enamel paint.

The artist was initially inspired by the Nordic Niflheim creation myth’s eleven frozen rivers flowing and manifesting life on earth. The icy metallic rivulets in Witvliets paintings echo this ancient legend. These self-referential painterly events overflow with subversive beauty and optical resonance. The shiny skin of their large surfaces are repellant yet seductive. These works of considerable size and texture could be seen as a re-invention of “Action Painting”, without the ejaculatory metaphysics of historical abstract expressionism. Due to the unique viscosity and properties of these industrial materials, the painting must be done spontaneously, producing these enigmatic relics of private studio “ performance “.

Witvliet’s work’s both reject and expand the traditional horizontally orientated landscape field, although traces of the painting’s previous incarnation as well as grids and other forms slip in and out of our vision.

These murky yet luminous paintings remind me of similarily scaled works by Ross Bleckner and Anselm Kiefer yet maintain a more cool and cryptic demeanour.

Perhaps less overtly political than some of Witvliet’s other series, these paintings unravel like a slow and meditative coagulations of reference and meaning, chance operations a la Brian Eno or John Cage, blown up to mural painting scale.