Jeroen Allart
28/05/2005 t/m 28/08/2005
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.
