BS (Bert Steevenz) - In your more recent paintings there appears, from a pure art of painting approach, a sort of fata morgana, an image referring to reality: a rock formation, a planet surface, a sponge. Did you become aware of the tradition of painting and it’s limits? Within the modernistic tradition, of which the fundamental art of painting is the absolute end, the flatness of the painting is considered important as part of the objective character of the painting: a painting is nothing more than a coat on canvas. Greenberg’s range of idea’s was hereby decisive. The intrigue of your work is that by using pure painting an illusion of depth is created. With the same means you undermine, as it were, the principle of modernism. Simultaneously there is a question of controversy. You want to make self-referential work, yet a certain image is created, however elusive.

BS - Does the visibility of the physical treatment of painting fall within these controversies?

I start from a monochrome. I use it now as an undercoat and basis in contrast to my earlier monochromes. In this sense I don’t paint monochromes. It is rather a reference to the monochrome tradition. The wild gesture you see in some of my recent paintings is a quasi-wild gesture. This ‘wild’ movement is not affixed to paint, but is aroused by the corrosion of the monochrome layer of paint with thinner. I neutralize the quasi-wild gesture once more by sweeping vertically and horizontally many times with a soft broom creating a grid of actions, which bring out the transport of the dissolved paint on the one hand and the other literally smoothing out all previous actions thereby producing a photographic image. It is the art of painting about painting over which I paint. In the first paintings that were created in this spirit I initially wanted to show this literal process of dissolving, even to illustrate the monochrome. The interaction with painting is for me literal, as in dissolving the paint as well figurative, as in dissolving the modernistic ideal. Since 2000 the grid treatment has been further enforced whereby the action, still visible in earlier paintings, disappears further and further to the background until it becomes illegible. This illegibility of the painter’s actions increases the photographic effect thereby wishing to banish the didactic character of process painting. In the treatment, painting may for me have lost its romantic origin. In the image, it returns intensified. Yet the creation of these paintings remains a physical matter.

BS - Many images are explicitly beautiful. A form of aesthetic is created that some may reject. Do you intentionally aspire to this aesthetic?