Over het werk van Theo de Bruyn
It seems so simple nederlands | deutsch | français
Even at first glance Theo de Bruyn’s work is immediately pleasant to the eye. The paintings are beautiful in the simplest sense of the word. They exude peace and harmony – in the colours, the compositions, the rhythms and constituent elements. You look at worlds, landscapes, spaces or surface divisions that simply feel right. As a spectator you feel invited, accepted into places where everything is in harmony: small, geometrical elements with cloudy backgrounds and monumental monochrome areas. Large horizontal and vertical gestures in black and white together with a multitude of subdued, yet rich, intense colours – small disruptions. Friendly and playful, but also severe, sometimes even rigid.
It seems so simple.
It is deceptively easy.
Luckily.
Because anything that is just pretty or pleasant bores quickly.
You have been fooled.
Because this just isn’t possible.
De Bruyn brings together such diverse elements, such enormous contrasts – spatial and flat, graphic and pictorial, abstract and recognizable, monumental and playful – you could drown in its abundance. How does he stop the expressive means from corroding, repelling or expelling one another, and manage to get them to form a balanced painting? Paintings that represent the unsolvable mystery of the impossible world we are looking at.
Perhaps De Bruyn will succeed because he started ‘small’: in his earlier work he limited himself to four painted forms. ‘Everything is four’, is the title of the latest painting that he made in this series. Colour was introduced slowly. Forms, lines, colours began to be repeated: to make it clearer, more explicit and to introduce rhythm. In this way he continued to open new areas, ask new questions, and explore new possibilities. The work became more graphic – but certainly no less free, because as observer you can feel and experience the path that De Bruyn has taken to realise this simplicity. You see that it has all been carefully worked out, see that he knows what he is doing, knows what paint does, how colours work, what you can achieve with contrasts or with figurative elements. And you can sense the pleasure of the artist who, while painting, asks himself questions and challenges himself.
‘There has to be tranquillity on the canvas,’ he remarks, ‘as well as space and life. A canvas has to live.’ But he does not make it easy on himself; he searches for that ideal by actually combining contrasting elements and looking for solutions to this. He is able to do this, in short, simply because he can, because in the course of the years he has learned how to bring canvases to life – and that says it all, yet it does not finish there…
Marco Kunst