Jan Andriesse (1950)
Painter Jan Andriesse relates to phenomena that are virtually impossible to visualise. A curve in a river, the soft light of a rainbow or the mercurial ripples of light on dark water: how can they be captured in paint on canvas or paper? Each of Andriesse's works revisits the beauty of daylight, water and reflection and the way in which we perceive them, each time with renewed passion and precision. His abstract paintings are derived from nature, but also use linear forms like the circle, the ellipsis and the arc. His canvases sometimes take years to complete, because they are built up of hundreds of layers of acrylic, which he sometimes mattes with powdered marble. Since 1979, the composition of his paintings is always based on the Golden Section.*
The fact that Andriesse requires an 'earthly' material like paint for his explorations is something he finds limiting. 'What I'm trying to do is paint the formless light of a rainbow. But I can only make it darker, because all paint is darker than light, even the whitest white.' Nonetheless, Andriesse still succeeds in creating a dancing mist of colour that even seems to hover in front of the actual canvas itself. The longer you look, the more intense the colours of the mist become.
* Golden Section: a ratio defined as 1:1.618, known since classical antiquity (Euclides, 300 BC), that is found frequently in nature and has been used in art and architecture for centuries.
