Firminy
Painting transports knowledge through the medium paint on supports, and therefore also the light of the place where the paintings were made. Light and colour are sensuous components in the oeuvre of Koen van den Broek, who lives and works in Antwerp, owns a studio on the South-Korean island of Jeju, and who already as child was passionate about life in California. Three times light – that must be lots of luck indeed, and the worldwide transport of works under the influence of another light generates a discourse about the luminous impact on painting and its perception.
Van den Broek is architect and knows very well that architecture and light function like a team. That is expressed stunningly and subtly in Le Corbusier’s oeuvre, who for that matter wasn’t just a professional architect: he also painted. When the sun shines brightly, the monochrome colour fields of Le Corbusier’s concrete church in Firminy generate a deliciously ephemeral play of areas of colour in the famous house of prayer. Also the evocation of a star-spangled sky by means of small recesses in the concrete add to the metaphysical accentuation of the sacred space. And on the rhythm of the light and of the seasonal Christian feast days, the colours whirl around – deliberate and intended light reflections on the concrete context of the walls. ‘Painting cannot compete with architecture. Architecture cannot compete with painting. But they talk,’ van den Broek wrote during a nocturnal moment of reflexion.
The more or less schematic painting of ‘landscapes’ on the basis of self-made photographs is a way to preserve reality in art and to save it from a detached interpretation that would reject or deny the world. Van den Broek’s landscapes – small or panoramic, providing a wide view or showing some blown-up detail, painted with soft shades or with hard colours – are directly visual for everybody, recognizable as images that belong to humans and their surroundings, as part and parcel of their environment. The colour alienates the 1/1 experience of looking, because colour sometimes causes the light to float as an explicit accent that emphasizes the shape of the observed (urban) landscape.
A kerb (that is, a border) is a motif that often features in van den Broek’s oeuvre. As a compositional element, the kerb is not a trivial thing. It’s a perfect sign that lends visual perspective, opens and/or denies the pictoral skin within the painting, which itself as a ‘window’ leads us to a well-defined motif. For indeed, a kerb zooms in on and separates another spaces; the kerb is as it were un unpredictably twisting horizon in an area that has been specified as ‘urban’. It’s a line that follows a trajectory, a line that defines and like a lane in the early paintings of the American artist Frank Stella keeps ranks, till it disappears to follow wherever it leads to on its structurally twisting path.
For this occasion, a large-scale in-situ mural by van den Broek will mark his passage at Chambre avec vue, following the rich tradition of artists like Richard Long, Françoise Pétrovitch and Koen They, who have previously exhibited at Chambre avec vue. The work in-situ is Koen’s tribute to Matisse. The painting as a window, the painting literally as a look-out: this is meaningful artistic, deliberate strategy to orient the gaze of the spectator towards perceptual, material and imaginary/imaginative sensual pleasure. An experience that doesn’t comment on contents, but that constitutes all the more a dialogue with modern painting, departing from for example Henri Matisse’s powerful Porte-Fenêtre à Collioure (1914). An open window onto a reality that needn’t justify itself, and that consequently can limit itself and become image through an abstract colour field. The tendency towards abstraction via a superb looking at reality around us is in van den Broek’s oeuvre – like in Raoul De Keyser’s – a ‘plastic’ way to keep the painting on the middle lane between representation and presentation. The painting as a dispute with the state of affairs of reality, and (at the same time) with the materiality of the oil paint that captures the illusion of the image.