MAD GALLERY MILANO
Biennal of Art 2017 Artist: Enrico Nieuwenhuis
Enrico’s surname is Nieuwenhuis. This translates as New House (Nuova Casa). Perhaps this is the reason Enrico left the Netherlands at a young age. Looking for new horizons. He hitchhiked through Europe after which he crossed the ocean to go to Mexico. A few years later he travelled all over the United States. Only after having stayed there for over 10 years he returned to the Netherlands to settle in Apeldoorn. Since several years he has his studio here. This adventurous disposition, this craving for freedom, the desire to search for new roads, is something that can be found in Enrico’s work. He creates abstract work – on wood and on canvas – that is characterised by a great vivacity and originality in colours and shapes. This results in artwork of a timeless and universal character
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Critical review curated by: Deborah Maggiolo
Deborah Maggiolo Art Curator for MAD GALLERY MILANO Biennal of Art 2017
ENRICO NIEUWENHUIS
Enrico’s production is characterised by an oxymoronic essence: in fact, it features a strong abstract style, with regards to the object of the representation, yet a very “concrete” material presence with concerns to the proper tools and elements that the artist implements to give birth to his own particular vision. The prominent discord between these two opposites tendencies is surely a bonus feature in Enrico’s art and it gives his works a plus of refinement and complexity, increasing the viewers’ interest towards it. The same, this contrast kinds of make tangible those intimate feelings and emotions that constitute the raw materials of the artworks themselves: personal life experiences are translated into an artistic form in order to externalize and preserve them from the bugs of memory. And memory is properly one of the leading themes of Enrico’s production, which contemplates several emotional scenarios and landscapes inhabited by a specific individual feeling. Looking at his different works it’s easy to notice that their colour nuances vary according to the precise emotional intensity that they want to communicate, spanning from a colder to a warmer range; sometimes they even create ensembles that mix up these two polarities, leading, so, to experiment innovative emotional spheres. For instance, when getting in touch with Enrico’s paintings we are carried into a true emotional journey, through which we relive the artist’s experience in creating the artworks and through which we can experience his interiority as well as our own intimacy, awakened by the contact with these sentimental views where we are brought to immerse ourselves pleasantly. In fact, the paintings appears to be like abstract depictions of real experienced moments, postcards of faraway places and times which survived the painter’s memory; maybe a recollection of important occasions that, for good and for evil, have marked his existence. Although they’re presented to us in an abstract form, we can deduce that in some of them the inspiring subject is a realistic landscape, yet altered by the force of imagination during the artistic process and transformed from mere memory into an aesthetic object. This added value plays a key role in the experience we make of the work, since it adds a more personal and intriguing level to the starting image. An example of this is the work entitled “The last stop” that seems to depict a kind of urban view at sunset. Again, the artwork left untitled appears to be portraying a natural environment inhabited by several water streams and lush vegetation.
Deborah Maggiolo Art Curator for MAD GALLERY MILANO Biennal of Art 2017
The last stop, acrylics on wood, brush and palette knife, 91 x 57 cm
Untitled, acrylics on wood, brush and palette knife, 91 x 57 cm
Deborah Maggiolo Art Curator for MAD GALLERY MILANO Biennal of Art 2017
Since the Romantic Age, the natural landscape has often been considered as a guardian of human history and, above all, of the history of individuals, thanks to its ability to reflect their beliefs and feelings. In line with this Romantic tendency, here the relationship between personal mood and external landscape is maintained, yet reconfigured in abstract form and, therefore, in direct connection with the artist’s interiority. Nevertheless, even if Enrico travelled a lot while trying to widen his horizons, his production cannot be entirely traced back to natural landscape as a major source of inspiration, that, instead, is sure enough always a direct expression of an interior mood, making expressionist use of colour to convey individual meanings – as in “Emotion”, where an energy stream appears to emerge from the surface of the canvas, or in “The light always wins from the darkness”, where a golden rising dawn comes to break the veil of darkness.
Emotion, acrylics on wood, brush and palette knife, 120 x 120 cm
Deborah Maggiolo Art Curator for MAD GALLERY MILANO Biennal of Art 2017
The light always wins from the darkness, acrylics on wood, brush and palette knife, 91 x 57 cm
Being abstract paintings, Enrico’s works don’t present reality as it is but, instead, they report the feeling that that reality produced as a reaction in the individual soul. And properly, the strong and intense colours chosen evoke thrilling and authentic emotions, loading the works of a strong energy and pathos. The same is conveyed by the layering of the brush strokes, which, as wires, join in forming the visual plot of the representation; an aggregation of consequent instinctive gestures able to create, every time, innovative and unexpected environments. Guided by the artist's feelings, these pictorial actions combine into ever-new configurations. In such kaleidoscopic creations, the subsequent motions of the pictorial gesture generate uncertain and almost illusory settings: all these images appear to us like veiled, recapturing that indefinite feeling emerging from those old photographs blurred by the coat of time. The paintings, in fact, seems to escape our will to decipher them in all their complexity and are given to us as elusive and indefinite. This peculiar blurring technique could find a direct reference with the poetic of Gerhard Richter, German visual artist famous for creating abstracts works that investigate the boundaries between reality and illusion while trying to grasp the essence of the surrounding world. Of a far more subjective content, Enrico’s artworks certainly want to tell an individual story while, at the same time, recalling the individual stories of their spectators, invited to make them their own by reconfiguring their meaning each one according to his own experience. Are you ready to take off on this amazing pictorial adventure? Deborah Maggiolo Art Curator for MAD GALLERY MILANO Biennal of Art 2017