RESISTANCE by Sander Reijgers

Description

MARK PEET VISSER GALLERY, in collaboration with Majke Hüsstege Projects, opens a remarkable exhibition in the The Basement of the gallery with work by the painter Sander Reijgers (1977).

This artist, who has an unbridled energy and was inspired by his receptiveness to the continuous flow of impressions around him in an earlier phase of artistry, has managed to contain his temperament in an artistically intriguing way. His earlier hybrid oeuvre of objects, clothing and installations has made way for large and smaller, to a certain extent

apparently monochrome paintings of oil on canvas. Paint and pad have become the protagonists of his artistry.

The title of the exhibition, RESISTANCE, also refers to this new interpretation of this artistic concept. The paintings by Reijgers show fields of color that have been built up by placing paint layers over each other after coating. In this method, the artist has exercised respect for the surface, for paint material, for color and for brush or roller in extreme control. By giving the paint layers a certain drying time, he can manipulate the way in which they react to the next layer. In this way, the skin of the painting arises in a controlled process, as if the painting were an organism in growth. The front view of the canvas shows this stratification by the play of light on the almost mobile colors; Paint points and balls that create this color and light show are created by the regularly broken paint surface. At the same time, this depth is present because the different layers are still visible at the edges and at the sides of the canvas.

The process of painting is a conscious surrender to time and action for the artist. Respect for the way the material responds to this leads to structures that arise from the relationship they have with each other. And from this process of becoming, the painting is created as an autonomous item. Sander Reijgers sees this method and the surrender to this as an opposition to the speed and volatile result orientation of today’s society.

The time needed to come to a good painting – and that can be years – requires control and silence. The artist’s temperament has been tempered and curbed and a painter has been born in the true sense of the word.