After Nurture | Gijs van Lith
The work of versatile Dutch artist Gijs van Lith changes the expectations and ideas that a viewer usually has about what a painting can or should be. If we analyze the origins of his creative actions, we see that Van Lith comes very close to the fundamental basic characteristics of action painting, also known as gestural abstraction or abstract expressionism. In this painting style, the artist lets the colors drip spontaneously onto the canvas, throws them on or smears them, instead of carefully applying them. The resulting work emphasizes the physical act of painting itself, as is the case with American Abstract Expressionism and Tachisme, a painting style in abstract art that originated in France in the 1940s and 1950s, also known as Informal. Art is mentioned. In this, the painting is experienced exclusively as a product of actions and matter.
Gijs van Lith mainly focuses his artistic research on painting, but his oeuvre also includes sculptures and installations. The creative process, the choice of materials and the image strategy – what we call the modus operandi – play a fundamental role and form the starting point for the essential background of every new creation. Van Lith considers the canvas on which a painting is made just as important as the material with which he paints. Aspects such as materiality, originality of the action, the relationship between the time of action and the timelessness of the work, and the clarity that the work receives physically, undoubtedly cover his entire work. In his most recent series of works entitled “After Nurture”, Van Lith delves deeper into another fundamental aspect of his research: the balance between creation and destruction. The artist explores this combination by challenging the established laws of nature by letting his intuition play with space and pushing its elasticity to the limit. In recent years, his painting style has even acquired a more plastic dimension, enabling him to create, develop and interact with his work in an increasingly dynamic and, material-wise, fluid manner. The relationship between the process and the finished work becomes an interactive dialogue in which there is no front or back.
Judgment is often suspended before his works are created because of an overpowering painterly haze, or, as he calls it, a "beast mode", a creative state in which the artist feels more like a beast guided by his instinct and intuition. Van Lith makes no distinction between well-considered actions and possibilities, between happiness and deliberate gestures. The result is the energetic and dynamic works that exist in an everlasting open dialogue between the conscious and the subconscious. In his new works, the process-based abstraction gives way to subjects such as signs, hand gestures and intuition, all in a synthetic and antithetical composition between the front and back of the painting. And so we arrive at the red that permeates all his most recent work, the color of an indescribable power implicit in its manifestation, the luminous nuance par excellence of the physical. In fact, these cloths seem to be made of flesh and muscle and at the same time seem content and fulfilled, not possessed. They are in a state that could be described as “After Nurture” – after eating – in which the fire of being nourished has died down and the physicality of the canvas remains in a balance consisting of the subtle relationship between the materiality and the emptiness of space, the frenzy of action and the relaxation of time.
Text by Domenico de Chirico
