Gravura Brasileira

GUIDO WINKLER
 
"Everything I do starts with a sense of wonder about the difference between physical en visual space. It is about reality and perception, interpretation and misinterpretation, about knowledge and the lack of it."  (2005)
Guido Winkler (*Alblasserdam, 1969), trained as a photographer and sculptor, uses the modern computer and ink-jet technology to develop his work. As well he makes paintings, mostly shaped canvasses, at times they are becoming installations. In Gravura Brasileira, Guido Winkler exhibits computer prints on Hahnemuhle William Turner paper from his TRANSITION series. 
His style is very concise with hardly any color. It is reductive and concrete but not constructivistic nor complete abstract. Yet, he believes what is aimed at the core will become more universal. 
Speaking of the title Transition, it refers to the bridges, gaps, windows, doors.... which the artist used more than once. Transition refers as well to the transcendental process of making art, as well to the continuing story: of what is becoming. 
Late 2006, a catalogue has been published with the significant title "Shift Your Focus".
 

PAUL DUYVIS

Paul Donker Duyvis relates himself as an artist on purpose with the non-western concept of the fuction of art.
The meaning of the image develloped in Western Art is a fact, but he relates it to complete different meanings and possibilities derived from other cultures. rituals and traditions.
 
The real and the fictional worldcan be considered as the complex relationshipbetween the material and spiritual world,
the temptations of the body and the spiritual duties of the soul.

These two extremes are strongly interrelated in human lifeand should not be seen as opposite poles or separate worlds.

Paul Donker Duyvis creates a Japanese atmosphere in his work, not only by using typically Japanese objects such as kimonos,
fans and rice or Oriental-looking women. These are obviously Japanese, or rather Oriental, attributes, but still just properties of his work.
These Japanese characteristics merge strongly with the ambiguity of his images.

The Japanese have an unspoken agreement not to regard paradoxical matters as paradoxical.
Contradictory elements are presented on a common level instead, camouflaging them with a certain vague ambiguity.
To Westerners, ambiguity is opposite to clarity, but the Japanese perceive this vague ambiguity as a means of understanding
the many layers of possible meanings. These characteristics can also be recognised in his work, strengthening the sense of Japanese aura. 

ERIC VAN DE GEER

Perturbing Pictures
By Martijn Verhoeven

The subjects in Eric Jan van de Geer’s work are always drawn from a familiar, everyday world: a Forsythia bush, a bedspread, a fence, a swing. At the same time, however, there is also something strange about these ‘normal’ objects: the objects do not look clear and neutral to us. We often see them from an unusual perspective, a section is cut off or simply not clearly visible, and sometimes the sense of scale is absent as well. This imbues the subjects with something perturbing, sometimes even spooky.
That undertone is sometimes reminiscent of ‘disturbing elements’ in Alfred Hitchcock’s films (which Van de Geer happens to revere): at first glance everything seems to be very peaceful and normal in those films, until a small detail introduces some kind of blemish into the stream of images, spurring further dramatic development and unease.1 The glass of milk that receives a questionable amount of visual emphasis in the film Suspicion, for example, or the necklace that eventually betrays Kim Novak in Vertigo. Hitchcock’s universe incorporates a remarkable number of emotionally charged objects that are seemingly nothing out of the ordinary, but suddenly acquire an unusual intrinsic and dramatic significance.
In a similar manner, Van de Geer’s works are pervaded with something, as if they are depicting the details of a crime scene. There are no visible traces of the deed remaining, but there is still an unsettling sense that something has happened at this spot. What are those stains on the bedspread? What actually happened with that swing? The beholder scours the image like a detective in search of clues, but finds no answers.

Unlike a painter, Van de Geer never begins with a white sheet of paper or a blank canvas. His starting point is the photographic image. But take note that he does not use photography for its documentary qualities; he is not ultimately interested in presenting things as they appear to us. For him, the appeal of photography lies in the relative detachment from the medium; the camera lacks the highly idiosyncratic gesture of the painter’s brush.
His images extend way beyond the boundaries of the discipline of photography. Not satisfied with the photographic image, he literally adds layers to it, superimposing a screen print, a layer of paint or floral patterns. And though he does this in a manner that does not completely obscure the original photographic layer, it is still radically altered and manipulated. This way of working reveals an unmistakable interest in texture, the surface of the work (an interest he shares with the Belgian artist Dirk Braeckman2), but also and most particularly in the reduction and abstraction of the image: some elements are eradicated, while others are isolated and accentuated, or rendered as a negative. The spaces often seem more important than what is actually depicted.

That abstraction – a quasi-painterly technique – is how Van de Geer succeeds in detaching the image from the quotidian, the nondescript, and fixes it in a different, indeterminate time. This transforms the pictures into icons, but lacking in serenity; they sooner evoke an uneasy restlessness, pregnant with meaning. Perturbing indeed.