LANG warmly invites you to the new exhibition by recently graduated artist Loes van Roozendaal. The exhibition will open on Saturday 22 March.
At her graduation show at the HKU in 2024, Loes van Roozendaal caught our attention with her white paintings, where the light falling on the glass was central. She also painted blinds, through which the trembling daylight seemed to shine.
The white paintings she is displaying in this exhibition appear, at first glance, more formal. The paintings are fragments of objects or places that are influenced by their surroundings throughout the day. Within her work, everything revolves around light and time: the continuous change of everything around us. The painting serves as a fragmentation of a moment because, in an instant, it is different. Everything is changeable and transient. However, through a painting, she feels she has control over what she does not want to disappear. She isolates a moment, a light effect, or a memory within the frame of the canvas.
The paintings suggest a figurative representation, but at the same time, we are looking at an abstract image. The question she asks herself every time is: “How can you achieve the essence of an object or material with as few strokes as possible?”. With a thick layer of oil paint applied to the pre-treated canvas, she builds the image with a palette knife. By scraping the paint off with the palette knife, creating differences in pressure, she adds texture to the white top layer. This creates subtle raised frayed edges, a play of covering or revealing the loosely painted underlayer. Through this highly precise and skillful way of working, Loes creates an image that challenges the viewer to look at it longer. Then it becomes apparent that the color breaking through the white seems to indicate a certain moment of the day: sometimes it’s the morning sun, other times it’s the evening light shining through the white. Beneath the quiet white, time seems to be hidden.
In a world where we are overwhelmed with images in bright colors and constant movement, Loes’ , monochrome works freeze time; they compel us to contemplate. Our visual ability, the process of looking, is engaged. By moving around the work, we discover new structures, and the image changes with the light’s angle. We also notice that the diptychs are arranged in such a way that the square pattern perfectly flows from one canvas to the other. Loes van Roozendaal leaves nothing to chance; she has fully mastered this complex working method. With this, she shows the meaningful silence between bright white and silky soft white.
Loes van Roozendaal was selected for the Best of Graduates 2024 by the Ron Mandos Young Blood Foundation. She was the winner of the Lakeside Collection Award 2024, which is annually awarded to one of the artists from the Best of Graduates. The prize is a 10-month residency in the beautiful space of the Lakeside Collection at the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen
