Dirk De Bruycker l o g o s
LewAllenGalleries
DIRK DE BRUYCKER LOGOS
SEPTEMBER 26 - NOVEMBER 2. 2014
LewAllenGalleries Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | info@lewallengalleries.com
cover: Animation, 2014, asphalt, gesso, cobalt drier and oil on canvas, 72” x 60”
LOGOS: New Paintings by Dirk de Bruycker
September 26 - November 2, 2014
Often aligned with such color-field greats as Helen Frankenthaler and Mark Rothko—particularly in his practice of Rothko’s words “only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless”—de Bruycker’s complex mix of unusual materials differentiates his work, producing especially ethereal yet deeply emotional effects. De Bruycker’s paintings read like masterful imprints of the artist’s subconscious life, evocations of what he calls his “innate— passive knowledge.”
For decades, Dirk de Bruycker has been creating beautifully engaging canvases from painterly florescences of spirited pigment, applied in varying viscosities and floating on underlying shadows of image drawn in asphaltum. De Bruycker has evolved both an unusual process and his own aesthetic temperament over more than 35 years of experimentation and patience. His distinctive style and the emotional valence of his work derive in large measure from the artist’s adept capacity to merge technique with intuition. This combination of intentional means and creative gnosis produces paintings of remarkable beauty and unusual meditative force. It is what he calls his “painterly logic” and it is this synergistic relationship in his work between the intuitive and the methodical from which the title Logos is derived for the exhibition of new work at LewAllen Galleries.
They, like the artist himself, exhibit a blend of both the joyful and the introspective. In them there is a feeling of quiet substantiality—visual resonances of a life fully lived. One senses that the unique facture of these works draws from a wide range of personally authentic experience, from deeply-felt sensations of happiness as well as despair,
His unique approach to composition has helped make de Bruycker’s work widely regarded for its sense of mystery and intrigue, coming from blending penumbras of dense hue, drawn pattern, and luminous translucent wash stained onto canvas. from glimpses of moods both light and dark, and from a disciplined intellect that mediates fluidly between concerns of both inner and outer life.
Part of this Logos is rooted in a distinctive process that makes unique use of materials and composition. It begins with an under-painted image on raw canvas drawn with brush using thinned asphaltum, the bituminous material used in roofing, highway surfacing and in early photography and printmaking. In the next phase, de Bruycker sets aside his brush and applies successive layers of oil color, cobalt drier, paint thinner and gesso by pouring and scraping, tilting and flowing. The work is periodically set aside and allowed to dry permitting the under-painted image to emerge through the veils of interacting colors.
Like the work of mid-20th century Abstract Expressionists to whom he is rightly considered an artistic successor, de Bruycker’s paintings bear the stigmata of an unvarnished humanity but, significantly, without the splenetic egoism that accompanies a Pollock or de Kooning. De Bruycker’s gentle yet unconstrained sweeps of color and line radiate expressively but contemplatively, rather than demanding narcissistic regard. His paintings act as markers along the artist’s path of life, emblems of a psyche and heart in search of what matters.
This unique approach to composition has helped make de Bruycker’s work widely regarded for its sense of mystery and intrigue, coming from blending penumbras of dense hue, drawn pattern, and luminous translucent wash stained onto canvas. These elements combine to form graceful blooms of powerful emotional expression. De Bruycker’s viscerally executant hand always is evident, converging sweeps of vaporous color with subtle tinges of sepia stain to produce forms that appear to float elegantly in atmospheres of silent contemplation and enigmatic sensuality.
It is the impossibility of painting a likeness of such ultimate truth—a verisimilar portrait of the meaning of life cannot be done—that drives an artist like de Bruycker to paint again and again what at least might be imprints of the search and insights felt along the way. He makes versions of this experience knowing that he can never represent completely that which is ineffable but fulfilled in knowing 2
that his images can provoke such insights in others. The work he makes serves this cause both as expressions of his own intuitions about what it means to be human and as possible triggers for understanding by his viewer. His graceful effusions of color and form can function as gifts of sharing, as mandalas (in the language of the Buddhist or Hindu) serving to help focus contemplation about the Universe and one’s own struggle to find the Dhamma, that ultimate liberating truth of things.
symbolize the interplay of such conflict and struggle. He says about this: “We have a word in Flemish, ‘Tweestrijd’ which means the battle of two, but it implies an inner struggle, being torn, divided. These paintings could rather be interpreted in that way. Let’s say the struggle between passion and gloom, or reason versus excess, or action versus meditation. The restless heart or soul is searching for a more harmonious ‘coexistence’ of conflicting emotional states.”
In this artistic journey, the mystery of place and sensation is also inflected by de Bruycker within his distinctive visual language of color, texture and form. Born in Belgium and schooled both in Europe and the U.S., the artist has lived, worked and traveled extensively. His process and palette of sensual colors speaks of wonderment about and embrace for diversity of cultures and belief systems within them. For de Bruycker, both elements reverberate rich and indefinable strands of emotional energy present in the world that become his aesthetic mission to relate in his work.
This internal Sturm und Drang of colliding masses of oil color and form functions to ignite personal associations and memories, like enormous, brilliantly colored Rorschachs. The paintings plumb the universality of emotional aesthetics while retaining the possibility for intimate personal meaning and response. That his paintings grapple with the entropy of human existence charges his fields of color and drawn forms with a magnificent sense of the sublime and a particular notion of the beautiful. About this de Bruycker says: “Throughout the years I have searched for a tactile but fragile beauty, a kind of dangerous beauty, a fleeting one. This tragic (kind of) beauty interests me.”
The asphaltum under-painting he uses acts as a resist for his poured and scraped oil colors and suggests batik cloth from time he spent in India. Hues of vermillion and saffron often appear and recall the ageless vegetable dyes he would have seen in spiritual objects like turbans and Godhadi blankets there. From living in Latin America, de Bruycker is moved by the deep resonance of gold, purple and blood red of sacred objects. Ochre, cinnabar, and umber token the mysticism of breathtaking New Mexican canyon walls.
The complex interplay between de Bruycker’s method and mentality explains his affinity for the title of his exhibition. “Logos is a Greek word for non-mathematical, non-scientific, non-linear order, rather an intuitive, subjective, and complex order, but nevertheless an order.” The lingering order in de Bruycker’s organic works grounds their perceptive nature to the tangible while his improvisational, intuitive manner of painting resists it. From the combination comes a glimpse of the ineffable.
This metaphorical power of color clearly is important for de Bruycker. Like the early pioneers of non-representational abstraction at the beginning of the 20th century, de Bruycker prefers colors he sees as laden with meaning to those of the literally material. He refuses to use in his work “natural” colors he finds devoid of spiritual energy: white, green and blue, three colors he associates with the quotidian and shallowness of that which is superficial in the world.
– Kenneth R. Marvel
With de Bruycker’s paintings, the core of their profound power to evoke insight about life and meaning is his engagement with notions of its myriad conflicts and struggles. He says of his work: “Deeply human preoccupations have always been at the center of my painting. For me painting has to say something about our existence here and the enigma of it.” Within the disorder of life’s cycles—of its joy and sadness, hope and despair, love and hate—there is the marrow of meaning. De Bruycker’s contrasting color fields 3
Crimson, 2014, asphalt, gesso, cobalt drier and oil on canvas, 30” x 24” 4
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Intrusion, 2014, asphalt, gesso, cobalt drier and oil on canvas, 60� x 48�
Of the Soul, 2014, asphalt, gesso, cobalt drier and oil on canvas, 60” x 48” 6
Surrender II, 2014, asphalt, gesso, cobalt drier and oil on canvas, 84� x 72� 7
Fruition, 2014, asphalt, gesso, cobalt drier and oil on canvas, 84” x 72” 8
Drifter (Yellow), 2014, asphalt, gesso, cobalt drier and oil on canvas, 72” x 60” 9
Winter, 2014, asphalt, gesso, cobalt drier and oil on canvas, 30� x 24� 10
Spring, 2014, asphalt, gesso, cobalt drier and oil on canvas, 30� x 24� 11
Summer, 2014, asphalt, gesso, cobalt drier and oil on canvas, 30� x 24� 12
Fall, 2014, asphalt, gesso, cobalt drier and oil on canvas, 30” x 24” 13
Carmesi, 2014, asphalt, gesso, cobalt drier and oil on canvas, 30� x 24� 14
Encroachment, 2014, asphalt, gesso, cobalt drier and oil on canvas, 84” x 72” 15
Animo, 2014, asphalt, gesso, cobalt drier and oil on canvas, 72� x 60� 16
Of the Heart, 2014, asphalt, gesso, cobalt drier and oil on canvas, 60” x 48” 17
Surge, 2014, asphalt, gesso, cobalt drier and oil on canvas, 72� x 60� 18
Scarlet, 2014, asphalt, gesso, cobalt drier and oil on canvas, 30” x 24” 19
Guardian, 2014, asphalt, gesso, cobalt drier and oil on canvas, 84” x 72” 20
Drifter (Maroon), 2014, asphalt, gesso, cobalt drier and oil on canvas, 72� x 60� 21
DIRK DE BRUYCKER BORN Ghent, Belgium, 1955
2010 Mariam Diehl Gallery, Jackson, WY 2005 Scott White Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA Rule Modern Contemporary, Denver, CO 2004 Chiaroscuro Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ Buschlen/Mowatt Galleries, Palm Desert, CA Jan Weiner Gallery, Kansas City, MO Lemmons Contemporary, New York, NY 2003 The Lowe Gallery, Atlanta, GA (also in 2001, 1992) Chiaroscuro Gallery, Santa Fe, NM 2001 Peyton/Wright Gallery, Santa Fe, NM 2000 Linda Durham Contemporary Art, Galisteo, NM (also 1998, 1996, 1994) 1999 Jan Maiden Fine Art, Columbus, OH (also in 1997, 1996) Soma Gallery, La Jolla, CA 1998 Galerie Hom’Art, Antwerp, Belgium Jan Weiner Gallery, Kansas City, MO (also in 1991) 1995 Hand Graphics Gallery, Santa Fe, NM Kay Garvey Gallery, Chicago, IL (also in 1992, 1990) 1994 Galerie S. and H. de Buck, Ghent, Belgium (also in 1991, 1989) 1992 Galerie S. and H. de Buck at Casino Oostende, Belgium 1990 Conlon Gallery, Santa Fe, NM 1989 Lewallen/Butler Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM 1986 Gallery XXI, Antwerp, Belgium 1985 Gallery ADG, Ghent, Belgium (also in 1983)
EDUCATION 1980-81 Graduate Program Printmaking Department, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 1979-80 Tamarind Institute, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 1973-77 M.A. St. Lucas Institute of Visual Arts, Ghent, Belgium 1964-73 City Academy of Fine Arts, Sint Niklaas, Belgium AWARDS 1991 Vlaamse Executieve, Dienst Musea en Beeldende Kunst: Visual Artist Work Grant 1989 National Endowment for the Arts, Visual Artist Fellowship Grant 1988 Laureate, Visions of Excellence, Albuquerque United Artists, NM 1982 Printmaking Laureate, Province of East Flanders Award of Fine Arts, Belgium SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2014 LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM 2011 Gebert Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM (also in 2009, 2007, 2005) Gebert Gallery, Venice, CA (also in 2010, 2008) Lucas de Bruycker Fine Art, Ghent, Belgium (also in 2003, 2000, 1999)
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Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | info@lewallengalleries.com Š 2014 LewAllen Contemporary LLC Artwork Š Dirk de Bruycker