In response to the increasing transience or devaluation of images in our current media culture, René Jolink (1958) offers an answer through his paintings. Tineke Reijnders writes in the catalogue about his secondary way of painting the following: “By creating distance, he paradoxically enables himself to choose motifs that are close to him. Sometimes they are 16th century paintings that mean a lot to him, other times they are images related to his childhood in Spain, sometimes they are things that are literally close by, like the floor of his studio. The outer layer, that of the disintegrating image, is also that of the seeping image, which is nothing less than the promise of the restored image in all its glory.” Mark Kremer’s statement from 1993 still holds true: “The motifs in these paintings are painted in such a way that they shift and almost merge into a haze that lies on the surface of the painting. The appearance of the motifs is ambiguous: one moment they emerge from a misty distance, the next they are absorbed into the flat plane. These paintings seem to hesitate between evoking and suspending images.”
www.ftn-books.com has the van Abbe publication from 1996 now available.
