Erik Andriesse

Nightmares of Beauty

Once upon a time there lived a boy called Erik Andriesse, who distinguished himself from the passionless people around him by glowing in the dark. Now the country he lived in was a quite dark. Artists however would talk about the extraordinary light in that country.

During the 80’s all the artists were interested in the artificiality of life. A picture of a flower was much more interesting than the flower itself. Very few people still believed that everything that existed was part of nature itself. People lived in cities. Artists lived in their studios. Places filled with books, bottles and talk about art and artists and what was relevant and what was not.

And they forgot to love…

But Erik was aware of the fire that eats at the heart, while the clock ticks at night. The shortage of time, the repetitive movements of desire, the energy of the body watched by death. Flowers larger than life, dreams larger than life.

Nightmares of beauty.

He was ignored by the calculators, whose blood did not rise, when they saw his exotic death-dances on paper, but he continued on his own impatient way. Erik is not a conceptual artist. Erik is not an associative artist. He is not interested in displaying the cultural-historical aspects of his subject-matter. But Erik is also not the naturalist he seems to be. He even shows similarities (at times) to Spiderman, the comic-strip hero. Erik is not a cultural barbarian or a primitive. He reflects on the good, the bad and the ugly of the artworld and the synthetic problems of painting.

A Satyr in Arcadia

Erik Andriesse lived by the motto ‘Abundance Avails’ which he vigorously pursued with extravagant brushstrokes, vivid clamorous colours, and formats either vast or intimately small. The flowers and skulls and skeletons of people and animals undergo a rebirth on his canvases, animated anew by his sense of drama and directorship. His gestural brushwork is so alive as to evoke only notions of vitality, energy, potency and proximity in the viewer. Mostly in full bloom, their last strength sometimes at its final ebb, Andriesse’s flower portraits infuse the blossoms with an incandescence, so uninhibited is Andriesse’s urge to reveal their beauty to the viewer. Like a satyr in Dionysus’ retinue, Andriesse follows his instincts, plunges order into chaos, lets ecstasy hold sway and entrances the viewer with a surfeit of flowers and colours.

Andriesse attended Ateliers 63 in Haarlem from 1975 to 1978; an acclaimed graduate arts programme where principles such as structure, a system approach and reflection prevailed. The legacy of the equitable Mondriaan and the mentality that had fashioned the straight lines of the Dutch polder landscape predominated. On leaving the programme, it was several years before Andriesse had cast off the yoke of this Calvinist philosophy to embrace his true fascination: portraying nature as it appeared to him. 'I do not paint nature, I am nature', he said in 1985, quoting Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock. And where nature paints, reason ceases. Ateliers 63 had nonetheless inculcated in Andriesse a sense of scale and rhythm, enabling mastery of materials and the painterly gesture. The explosions of paint seem untamed and expressive but in fact follow a pre-conceived idea. On the canvas, Andriesse returns the flowers (bought quite ordinarily at an Amsterdam flower market) to their uncultivated state as though, rather than having been propagated in a greenhouse or on a flower farm, they reign over a natural realm where man is powerless. In this sense, the flowers articulate a yearning for Arcadia, a reflection of Andriesse’s longing for purity and to grasp the mystery of an existence: be it a bloom, a lifeless skull or a tropical shell.

The other can be grasped by observing it and identifying with it. Andriesse could draw and paint the same flower in his studio over and over again from different angles and at different stages of flourishing and decay. His observation engendered an ever-increasing penetration of the one specific flower before him, which he translated in a gesture in pencil or paint - exuberant and elated one moment, meticulous and rational the next. Two paintings of one and the same flower often reveal not simply two facets of Andriesse’s painterly virtuosity but are equally two faces of the character portrayed: the waywardness of a rock star or the majesty of an inviolate queen.

Andriesse realised that two kinds of Arcadia resided within him: the untamed and the civilised. He is the satyr coaxing a melody from the pan flute, only to whip viewers of his paintings into a tempestuous tarantella. And, whichever Arcadia we choose, Andriesse always lets us discover the other side within ourselves. Every painting bears you off to an unknown place, causing you to realise that ‘I too am in Arcadia’ - et in Arcadia ego.