ANTWERP.- We often use the term “minimalist” to refer to paintings of geometric composition and, even more so, for works that tend toward what is less, or almost nothing, or not much… works which are not marked by excess. Though the term evokes the primarily American artistic movement of the 1960s – whose shadow still lingers over our contemporaneity – it tends to mean, in everyday language, “reduced,” “simplified to the strict minimum.” But what would the strict minimum of painting be? What is its ideal reduction – like for a sauce? Without hesitation, I would say: the “surface.” Such are the questions in the exhibition Série Discrète now on view at
valerie_traan Gallery until June.
Geert Vanoorlé’s painting is on the surface, purely and simply. No illusionist depth, nothing in front, nothing behind, merely the pictorial surface. Yellow, red, blue, green, grey, black, white, beige, ochre… Single surfaces on metallic supports that comprise units, which Vanoorlé combines and assembles into compositions.
The units are like container lids, one side indented, the other flat. The indented side is white; the flat side, colored; and the painter alternates them: indented v. flat, non-color v. color. Proximity, contact, phrasing, silence. It’s all there. How blue appears beside yellow. How it converses with green when there’s white in between. How we go from maximum color contrast – red beside blue – to a value contrast – two nearly identical yellows. How color contaminates the nearby or adjacent white.
But these surfaces are not simply units of color. This is not Donald Judd. There is nothing mechanical or industrial in the application of color. Nothing of a modernist purity in this painting. Each element possesses a vibration that comes from the stroke, the modulation created by it: difference of saturation, the encroaching of a red onto yellow, visibility of brush strokes, slight ridges… Color renders the hand’s presence in the lightness and touch of its approach and placement. There is as much impurity and irregularity in the color and its edges as in the support itself. The folded metallic plates possess in themselves a slight manual inflection, a fragility.
Fragility. Geert Vanoorlé’s paintings are not fragile in the literal sense of the word, not any more than his art, yet they attempt to maintain a correctness of balance within a semblance of precarity that is comparable to the immobility preceding movement, the silence just before sound. They are what is there, without imposing their presence, but they manifest it subtly, and in the end they resonate… pianissimo.
Born in 1965, Leuven, Belgium Vanoorlé lives and works in Ghent, Belgium. Since 1987 Geert Vanoorlé has been steadily painting a meandering oeuvre with the aestheticism of the gentleman. He creates an elegant beauty averse of bravura and big gestures. For a moment, the wicked world outside is left at the doorstep. When browsing through the artist’s sketchbooks, one detects an experienced artist who draws flowers as well as his own hand. His paintings are pervaded with nature’s proportions. The paintings are discreetly permeated by reality. Some paintings refer to Sint-Truiden’s soccer team, others are about the sweat cloth of Saint Veronica, a flag, or a fish. As the painter incorporates these themes in his work in a subdued way, there’s more to it than merely positioning planes within the confines of the canvas stretcher. On top of that, Piero della Francesca’s work resonates in his paintings, as well as Johan Sebastian Bach’s music, Eric De Volder’s language and Ellsworth Kelly’s drawings.
The remarkable thing about the close-to-nothing that Geert Vanoorlé paints, is that it evokes a palpable reality, and by doing so it finds an exit to the outside world at every turn. The artist’s commitment is the delicate way in which he deliberately gives meaning to life on this planet and sings its praises.
The extreme and consistent way in which the painter disconnects the imagery of the painting from the actual painting act, by indirectly eliciting the image and the composition through such modest acts as folding and cutting, renders the paintings disengaged and bereft of sensation.
Geert Vanoorlé thoroughly contemplates the relationship between the work of art and its environment. The way in which the artist set up two painted paper parallelograms in a staircase of the old Courthouse in Ghent (page 60-61) exemplifies his deliberate way of dealing with surfaces in space. The two parallelograms seem to float on the wall as if projected by a light source.
The contemporaneity of his latest paintings is to be found in their material reduction to the conceptual acuity of their metal carrier – and is the answer of the painter to the present-day commotions. All his paintings are intimi of Charles Baudelaire’s well-known verse and Henri Matisse’s painting it inspired: “Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, Luxe, calme et volupté.”
After receiving his education in painting in Sint Lucas Ghent (1983/1987), he exhibited amongst others at Gouvernement (Ghent, B) and D’Apostrof (Deinze, B). Previous exhibitions at Valerie Traan Gallery include "Le Silence" (group, 2016); "image imaginer" (duo show, 2018); "(under)construction" (Art Brussels, 2019); "Le Quotidien" (group, 2019); and "a selection of gallery artists" (group, 2020). His work can be found in various private collections. Besides his practice as a visual artist, Vanoorlé also works in theatre, taking on scenography, light and/or graphic design for companies such as Toneelgroep Ceremonia, Muziektheater Transparant, KIP, Behoud de Begeerte and De Blauwe Maandag Compagnie.
