Barbara Seiler

In his solo show “Knock Knock” Dutch artist Sander van Deurzen (1975, Venlo, NL) opens the door into a bizarre world that is furious and grotesque at the same time. Mosquitoes out of a comic strip circle a fish head placed on a plate with sticky blubber dripping slowly from the ceiling. And small Buddha figures from the Chinese shop rise next to oversized, pink and yellowish tarts. Sander van Deurzen’s paintings describe an absurd kind of realism that is based on traditional Dutch themes such as transience, mortality and the fragility of life. Where the Dutch and Flemish old masters portrayed skulls, rotten fruits and withered flowers Sander van Deurzen applies images he finds in advertising and mass media and replaces the moldy fruits with creamy tarts and pink candy, the skull with decaying fish heads. By exaggerating the different forms he depicts life as being funny and tragic at the same time.

Not only in his choice of subjects but also in the composition Sander van Deurzen refers to Dutch old master paintings: in „t-h-reats“, 2009-2010, he places a huge, dark, almost black tart in the left lower corner of the painting, thus moving the fish head, the actual main motif, away from the viewer into the background. Johannes Vermeer has exploited this technique to create the illusion of spatial depth in paintings such as “ The Art of Painting”, 1662-68, “The Geographer”, 1668/69, “The Music Lesson”, 1662- 64, and “Woman with a Pearl Necklace”, 1662-65 by positioning a dark, heavy, brocade quilt or a sable curtain in the lower section of the painting.

The use of highly watery acrylic paint and a dynamic, broadly spaced style are characteristics of Sander van Deurzen’s work. While his earlier paintings reflect the full range of pastel hues, he has recently shifted to darker, acherontic colors. Pink is now employed as symbolic for blood and decay as in his series of “Accident Paintings”. Frequently his objects and figures dissolve into abstract shapes and reveal themselves only by the title of the painting: at first glance, „Woman looking in mirror“ appears like a harmonic composition of orange and grey ovals and only later exposes a young girls face, half covered by a baroque mirror. And the consistent color sequence of orange, brown into different kind of red hues unveils a grotesque, widely opened throat gobbling down a tart and revealing small, white teeth sticking out of bloody gums.

Sander van Deurzen gives us the following explanation: „I want my paintings to move away from the visible reality in order to just come closer to reality, displaying what you can not see, but which you know is there“.