What is it with the
Netherlands that makes them produce such great artists? It's like how
Iceland is crawling with amazing musicians. It's no surprise then that
Netherlands artist Jeroen Allart is such a brilliant painter. Simple lines
and colors, smooth shadows, huge blank spaces; they're just incredible
paintings. Maybe there's just something in me that loves anything reminiscent
of mid-century design or the subtle geometries of Art Deco. Allart has
both, but coupled with a modern flair. It's the best of all worlds, and
it makes my eyes go funny. I want an entire wall painted by him. [bron]
I love these paintings by jeroen allart so much it's almost hard to breath.
I love their flatness, their color, their subject matter, their composition.
That's all I have to say. Love, pure and simple.
Clear, simple and colourful: three adjectives that sum up the paintings
of Jeroen Allart (b. 1970). His exhibition at the GEM will fill six rooms
with highly simplified paintings of landscapes. He has earlier produced
humorous paintings not only of cats, rabbits and other animals, but also
of cowboys, firemen, windmills and boats. Jeroen Allart’s work has
a refreshing lightness of touch. His amusingly simple paintings require
no complex explanation. There is almost no other artist who shows us so
directly what he wants us to see: a horse’s head, a burly fireman
or, as now in the GEM, a landscape.
Landscape painting tends to evoke associations with a past era but these
are instantly banished by the first glimpse of Jeroen Allart’s work.
His landscape paintings are invariably composed of a number of completely
stylised elements – a field, the sky, a farm. Combined with the
bright colours he uses, this simple visual idiom gives the landscapes
a strong graphic quality. This is no accident: Allart completed a vocational
design training for the graphics industry before attending the National
Academy of Visual Arts (Rijksacademie) and the Willem de Kooning Academy.
The choice of subject, unfussy shapes and bright colours of the series
of landscape paintings to be shown at the GEM give the works a serenity
that reflects that of the Groningen landscapes that inspired them.
