HANS BROEK
Hans Broek has been working in Los Angeles for some time. There he paints and draws primarily desert landscapes and urban scenes. Along with Robert Zandvliet, Broek is one of several Dutch painters who wish to give contemporary expression to the classic theme of the landscape. His depictions of rugged, barren areas on the American west coast are painted memories of what the artist saw during his travels by car. These are visual reconstructions, landscapes that are partly realistic and partly imaginary.
Take, for instance, Untitled (1996): a panoramic view of a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. Dozens of buildings are scattered about on the hillsides, thick with vegetation. The sky is nothing more than a void – not a single cloud is in sight. In the bright sun, everything has an uncommonly sharp appearance. But no matter how realistic the scenery may appear to be, there is something slightly unreal about it. The distinction between a sharp and detailed foreground and a lessening of focus toward the background has been abolished. The abrupt division between land and sky counteracts any suggestion of atmospheric depth; distance and proximity have forgotten their roles. What we see is a shallow setting, a coulisse construction – as though the painting represents not reality but a derivative of it, a film set perhaps. After all, Hollywood is just around the corner.
Hans Broek evidently enjoys the painterly construction of such semi-fictitious urban scenery. It allows him to combine various stylistic devices. Roofs, windows and facades are rendered by him as bright pink or caramel brown surfaces, painted dead straight with the aid of masking tape. The bushes, on the other hand, are painted in lush movements. The tops are adorned with glistening, silvery white specks. This gives rise to a decorative pattern of fan-shaped planes, elegant swirls and dots – one that is subtly interwoven with the structure of the geometric planes.
Broek’s drawings betray, once again, his fondness for (graphic) stylistic devices. The white area in the lower right-hand corner of Glendale (1995) functions, like the large buildings in the previously mentioned painting, as a traditional repoussoir or, if you will, as a blind spot in one’s perception.
The notion of semblance is a special. concern of Hans Broek’s. In After Hercules Seghers (1996) he draws a Dutch church tower among barren hills, referring to the artificial quality of landscapes done by Hercules Seghers. This seventeenth-century painter and etcher had no problem with situating the houses of his neighbors on the other side of Amsterdam’s Lindengracht in a desolate, rocky landscape. The stepped gables that he saw from his window and the archaic wasteland from his imagination were forged together into ‘a landscape of the mind’.
The combination of painterly stylistic means could already be seen in earlier, somewhat more crudely painted works by Hans Broek. The patterns of specks were preceded by the bright tops of shrubs in Untitled (1995), a barren landscape in blazing colors. The placement of rectilinear planes alongside irregular flecks was tried out before by the painter in Untitled (1993-1994), which shows a house surrounded by several birch trees. The strange colors of this painting – the sky is mint green, the roof bright red, the bushes blue – are reminiscent of some Norwegian village scenes of Edvard Munch and contribute to a rather melancholy atmosphere.
Untitled (1994), on the other hand, is sooner a test of painterly restraint. The depiction is simple and somewhat trivial: a car, squeezed into its ‘parking place’ between the left and right side of the painting and set against a vacant background. In this painting as well, there is scarcely a trace of depth. A diagonal in the foreground leads the eye, quickly and efficiently, to the automobile; but beyond this the eye need not go. The range of color is limited to shades of grey, through which lemon yellow and orange shimmer here and there. The painting relies on tonal nuance and linear finesse. Whether this involves the swishing lines of the car door or the loop of a handle in the interior, painted with a steady and self-confident hand, it’s all cool and snappy.
The distinctive qualities of Hans Broek’s paintings include not only sober figuration and technical control, but also the slightly enigmatic presence of places and objects which are nonetheless rendered clearly and concretely. In this Broek shows himself to be a kindred spirit of Edward Hopper, whose deserted gas stations or solitary lighthouses express a similarly uncanny tranquility.
Dominic van den Boogerd, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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