Arjan van Helmond (1971)
The view of a house by night, a static living room or a deserted restaurant interior; these are the subjects that Arjan van Helmond depicts in his works in gouache or acrylic on paper. With a subdued colour palette, he paints interiors and exteriors in a style reminiscent of Edward Hopper: the same silence and timelessness, but devoid of human characters. Instead, Van Helmond places things in the lead roles: a crack in the floor, a piece of furniture, or a red chequered tablecloth.
'Initially, it was more portraits of houses that I wanted to bestow a sort of human character on from the outside,' says Van Helmond. 'My recent work is more about the look and the emotion that can be attached to that... You can't stop time, but the place where something happened is something that you always remember very vividly, down to the smallest detail.'* Van Helmond finds kinship with painters from all times: Paolo Uccello (1397-1475), Philip Guston (1913-1980), and even contemporaries like Sara van der Heide. Working on paper gives Van Helmond the ability to create works in irregular sizes: tearing and gluing as he works, he makes his images the size they need to be even as the representation emerges.
* I. Commandeur, ‘Arjan van Helmond - interview’, Metropolis M, 12.02.2007
