Jaap de Vries was a Dutch painter who alternately lived and worked in Breda and London. In addition to paintings and watercolours, he also made films, photographs and sculptures.
The human body and the landscape are a representation of his ideas about loneliness, violence and decay. His use of watercolour on aluminium creates an eerie and ethereal atmosphere in his work. Painting, for him, is about creating space for the shadows within us, for the world of desires tainted by fears.
He enjoys experimenting with various materials and continuously develops his own techniques. At times, he cuts with a stanley knife, while other times, De Vries wipes the pigment off the aluminium surface with a warm washcloth. Through my imperfect portraits, I create a metaphor for the real experience. It is the paint itself that inflicts wounds, apparently, its blood flowing ability capable of doing the same as real cutting, and a face is still able to speak and torture us with the question of what experience lies behind it, and apparently, paint alone can carry that power.
When he turned his attention from human anatomy to nature a few years ago, he was looking for a positive counterpart. His starting point was a boring patch of forest, with the intention of creating an intriguing image through the technique of depiction. “I wouldn’t want to walk through that forest,” a colleague said when he saw one of the paintings. This was an important statement for him: while he needed the drama of depiction in human anatomy to achieve his desired goal, in these paintings, he could display the violence of depiction through the depiction of a few innocent trees.
