"The Day Dream is an exhibition that leaves room for chance, wonder and everything that blooms in between."
THE DAY DREAM
Reinoud van Vught invites Marc Mulders & Marieke Bolhuis
13 April – 10 May 2025
Opening: Sunday, April 13 at 15:00
MPV Gallery, Oisterwijk
For his exhibition The Day Dream, Reinoud van Vught invited two other artists who each touch on his imagination in their own way: Marc Mulders, with whom he has experienced a shared sensitivity for nature and imagery since the 1980s, and Marieke Bolhuis, whose sculptural flowers make the exhibition's garden blossom in three-dimensional forms. Reinoud van Vught created a carefully, intuitively designed dialogue in which nature and imagination collide, light up and merge.
The exhibition has its origins in Reinoud van Vught's studio, and in his way of seeing. The painting of the same name by Dante Gabriel Rossetti not only gave the title, but also provided the impetus. “A daydream is what takes place in the studio,” he says. “Not a direct representation of reality, but a dream image that slowly takes shape between paint, matter and chance.”
Also playing a role was John Everett Millais' painting Ophelia: “I was fascinated by that woman in the water, and the nature growing, proliferating, taking over around her.” Van Vught's recent works are an abstract echo of this. They evoke images of underwater worlds full of leaf motifs, jellyfish, fish, twigs and spores. No recognizable representations, but suggestive constellations of clashing shapes and colors. “My leaves push you aside, my roots wriggle through. That's the kind of image I want to make.”
That energy also translates into the use of materials: acrylic as a base, overlaid with layers of oil paint and varnish. “I let materials collide. Things that don't normally mix, I force together. It's an orgy of nature, a controlled chaos.”
He calls his studio “a laboratory without scientific evidence, only visual evidence.” No direct observation from outside, but an intense search for what paint can evoke. “The moment when a stroke of paint becomes an image - that's where I want to be. Thinking from the paint. Like a stain in which you suddenly recognize something. That is also daydreaming.”
Marc Mulders' work moves in a softer, contemplative mood, but shares that same urge not to show nature, but to let it emerge. “Somehow our work always comes together,” Van Vught says. “It's been that way since the academy.”
Reinoud also follows a natural flow in the construction of The Day Dream. He works without a rigid plan and lets the works speak for themselves. “I usually bring way too much work,” he laughs. “And then I let everything come together, then I see what wants to show itself where. In the end, the exhibition has to dance. First collide, then dance. It's like painting itself. You start with a vague idea, an intention, and then it derails. It goes in a completely new direction. I'm also kind of a painter of chance.”
Thus, from the hand of Reinoud van Vught, a landscape with a poetic arc of tension emerges, in which the way of looking - groping, dreaming, searching - forms a coherent whole. The Day Dream is an exhibition that leaves room for chance, wonder and everything that blooms in between.
