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.