JEROEN KRABBÉ - DREAMED PARADISES

Source of inspiration for the new series of paintings Dreamed Paradises of Jeroen Krabbé are his trips to Tahiti, Hiva Oa and Martinique, as he followed in the footsteps of Paul Gauguin for a television series. The result is a series of 12 landscapes bursting with colour and emotion.

_{Jeroen Krabbé, Tahiti, 2018, oil on canvas 160 x 120 cm.}

Paul Gauguin emigrated to Tahiti in 1891. He left Paris in search of inspiration that would take art in a new direction, which he believed he would find in tropical paradises. Gauguin turned his back on industrialised Europe’s civilisation in order to find the essence of what it is to be human in a world that had not yet lost its connection with nature. Art seemed to have reached some kind of endpoint after the liberation of romanticism and the fundamental belief in the principle of art for art’s sake during the impressionist period. While depicting the moment, capturing a ray of light in just a few masterly brushstrokes as Monet did, liberated art from the heavy burden of meaning, it was also a dead end. Talented artists who came after the artistic giant Monet were looking to take art in other directions. They redefined its social significance in areas at a remove from the paint and canvas. Vincent van Gogh did so, with his social engagement and his expressiveness, and Paul Gauguin did too, travelling to places where life was still ‘pure’ – paradise – and making his paintings there, works that changed the way we look at art forever. Dreamed paradises, which seemed to promise a new escape from the industrialised world.

In 2018 Jeroen Krabbé travelled to Tahiti, Hiva Oa and Martinique to make a television series entitled Krabbé Seeks Gauguin, having previously made documentaries on Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso. During the filming of the series on Gauguin, Krabbé was inspired by his subject, and produced the twelve paintings that will be on display at Museum de Fundatie. Shimmering landscapes, seascapes, some light as a feather, many deep, heavy and absorbing, as if the ocean were teeming with monsters. Sublime paintings in which beauty rubs shoulders with danger.

_{Photo by: Marit van der Meer.}

_{Jeroen Krabbé, Hiva Oa 2, 2018, oil on canvas 120 x 160 cm.}

In his major retrospective at De Fundatie in 2008, Jeroen Krabbé clearly emerged as a painter of paradise. Paradises with a critical note, which feature no human presence – though this does not detract from their loveliness. In the years that followed he showed his impressive series on the life and murder of his grandfather Abraham Reiss. He then turned to his earliest memories, depicting childhood fantasies in an almost surrealistic way. Holocaust and childhood, shoulder to shoulder. In the summer of 2017 he took the landscape around Dalfsen as his subject, in a series of paintings that took him to the edge of abstraction. Now, Jeroen Krabbé’s Dreamed Paradises are to be shown at De Fundatie, inspired by the same source that inspired Paul Gauguin.

_{Jeroen Krabbé, Hiva Oa – Gauguin’s Graf, 2018, oil on canvas 160 x 120 cm.}

Three previous series by Jeroen Krabbé will be on display at Nijenhuis Castle in Heino/Wijhe: The Decline of Abraham Reiss (2010), Dum Vivimus Vivamus (2013) and Late Light (2017). Jeroen Krabbé will turn 75 on 5 December 2019.

A book of the same name will accompany the exhibition. Published by Waanders & de Kunst, it includes a conversation between Jeroen Krabbé and Ralph Keuning and a contribution by director Richard den Dulk.

_{Jeroen Krabbé, Martinique – Grand Rivière Baie, 2018, oil on canvas 120 x 160 cm.}

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