ILARIA BONACOSSA

Process as Time

This text was first published in Provisional Space, Roma Publications, Amsterdam 2011.

We have been trained to see painting as "pictures", with storytelling connotations, abstract or literal, in a space usually limited and enclosed by a frame, which isolates the image. It has been shown that there are possibilities other than this manner of "seeing" painting. An image could be said to be "real" if it is not an optical reproduction, if it does not symbolize or describe so as to call up a mental picture. This "real" or "absolute" image is only confined by our limited perception. (1)
Robert Ryman

The way Robert Ryman's paintings seem to cancel the classical distinctions between art as object and art as surface, structure and ornament, flat and three-dimensional space-emphasizing instead the role that perception and context play in creating an aesthetic experience-is instrumental in understanding Kees Goudzwaard's work. At the same time, Robert Ryman, developing out of Minimalism, has questioned through his work the 'silence' (2) of the modernist grid, redefining the value of the painted surface and the significance of the painter's hand. Using material, scale and support as essential elements for a distinctive artistic practice, Robert Ryman has developed, through the use of the white monochrome in its infinite variations, an exquisite investigation of the optical and material properties of painting itself. Kees Goudzwaard's work, on the other hand, offers us an insight in the state of contemporary painting through a dialogic practice, which makes us painfully aware of the complex genesis of images in today's society without denying the aesthetic outcome of his pictorial activity. This apparent contradiction is related to the fact that his education and the beginning of his career (mid eighties and early nineties) coincide with 'post-modernism', the insurgence of photographic appropriation strategies and the much-proclaimed death of painting (American abstraction in particular) as well as the birth of neo-expressionism and cannot be fully understood outside this critical context. Thus Kees Goudzwaard's programmatic decision to develop oil paintings as faithful 1:1 copies of abstract collages he has himself craftily created becomes a way of demonstrating the new possibilities the notion of appropriation has opened for painting. His work challenges, through repetition and reproduction, ideas of authorship, originality and meaning, questioning the fundamental roots of abstract painting's modernist legacy while reclaiming the pleasure of the act of painting. So even if his paintings' repetitive structure could suggest that there is no space except self-referentiality, his works actually refuse to acknowledge the exhaustion of painting as a practice. On the contrary, it is clear that Kees Goudzwaard's works react to painting's contemporary crisis.

My long familiarity with the art of Piet Mondrian, on which I spent a considerable amount of time and energy, taught me that nothing better enhances the perception of differences than having to deal with a deliberately reduced pictorial vocabulary. (3)
Yves Alain-Bois

Kees Goudzwaard's body of work demonstrates that pictorial complexity can be achieved by using an extremely restricted vocabulary. At the threshold between abstraction and representation, his large and small compositions can be read not only as abstract colour field paintings but also as still-life representations of paper and tape. In fact the strong three-dimensional and realistic presence of these works and their capacity to deceive the viewer into the actual existence of different planes, has justified their insertion into the tradition of Flemish trompe l'oeil painting (4). This is also due to the fact that Kees Goudzwaard's paintings are very smooth and devoid of texture, yet they have the capacity to create through the various levels of transparency and the nuanced changes of colour a sense of perspective space.
Kees Goudzwaard's work is easily recognizable and the deliberate structural repetition in the composition of flat coloured forms held together by masking tape becomes a way of increasing the viewer's sensitivity towards subtle variations in surfaces, borders and outlines as well as scale. The marks of the tape on the canvas have a double function: on the one hand they provide a sense of scale and reality to the composition; on the other, by creating different grids and spaces, they become a substitute for the line. Thus the tape itself becomes the element that contains, marks, selects and bears the sign of the artist's hand and of his decisions.
This is a consequence of the production process of the work, as Kees Goud-zwaard commences by creating a collage of cut-out square and rectangular pieces of coloured paper, acetate and transparent foil, which he composes in more or less regular grids by fixing them with paper masking-tape. This process is slow and complex, and develops gradually as it implies numerous decisions and a lot of looking and waiting until the artist finds he has achieved the desired composition and atmosphere.
At this point Kees Goudzwaard decides he can paint his original collage, meticulously reproducing it on canvas at a scale of 1:1, thus transforming the creative act of painting into a time-consuming work of transposition. Working like a photographer who has set his camera's diaphragm to remain open for months, occasionally for years, Kees Goudzwaard transforms the copy into a new original as the collage, which bears the trace of the artist's creativity, never enters the public arena and gets destroyed once the work is finished.
This way of working gives this artist the freedom to concentrate exclusively on paint and colour, allowing him and consequently his public to turn to the painted image without any source of distraction as the composition and the subject have become in some way insignificant.
The artist's painstaking process of elaboration and production underlines his conscious choice of a starting and an end point for each painting, embodying a complex contemporary idea of authorship and agency. The artist totally controls the world he represents; there is no space for chance or error even if he delegates the formal construction of the image to the technique of collage, as he remains the one who recognizes the potential in an image and chooses how to construct and paint it. As a result, the hard work of transferring onto canvas a two-dimensional object he has himself created allows him to reacquire authorship of an image that doesn't seem to imply any creativity.
The tautological economy of means in conceiving the work, united with the apparent simplicity of his poetics, his unquestionable painterly talent in perfectly reproducing reality is actually misleading and implies a complex post-modern understanding of painting's contemporary crisis and of its new agency in relation to photography's mechanical process. This is why Kees Goudzwaard's oil paintings seem voluntarily provisional, in some way open, unfinished, because he has decided to separate the moment of editing from the moment of painting. This tendency derives from an unconsciously acquired scepticism, from an impulsive rejection of the idea of permanency and eternity linked to painting. However, these interventions are not just auto-reflexive, post-modern exercises, but are born out of the desire to sample new issues and question, without erasing the trace of the artist's hand. Thus the fact that Kees Goudzwaard's production is twice removed from its author allows it to acquire an independence that explains its strong and silent physical presence.
It is as if in order to find a way of communicating directly with his public Kees Goudzwaard needs to operate in a purely pictorial universe made of colour, space and depth; a universe made of transparencies, borders and grids that, though visually totally two-dimensional, offers a layered visual experience and allows each viewer the freedom to emotionally relate to colour and shape. Furthermore, the way the formal composition is structured and the absence of background and foreground distances Kees Goudzwaard from any idea of representation and transforms each painting into pure surface. Yet their evocative titles underline how Goudzwaard has transformed an apparently straightjacketing practice into an occasion for infinite experiments and unlimited variations in the quest for pictorial expression. This is why Kees Goudzwaard's paintings can at the same time be so conceptually controlled yet emotionally charged. Furthermore, looking at the paintings, one cannot deny the fact that Kees Goudzwaard still feels the need and the desire to paint.

The grid promotes silence, expressing it moreover as a refusal of speech. The absolute stasis of the grid, its lack of hierarchy, of centre, of inflection, emphasizes not only its anti-referential character, but also-more importantly-its hostility to narrative. This structure, impervious both to time and to incident, will not permit the projection of language into the domain of the visual, and the result is silence. (5)
Rosalind Krauss

There is no narrative in Kees Goudzwaard's works. Nonetheless, the silence that his omnipresent grids evoke is closer to the silence that psychoanalysts conjure up in order to let our emotional subconscious resurface than to the modernist negation of art's possibility of speech. This is linked to the type of attention that looking at his paintings demands; his work enters into a direct dialogue with us as viewers, but does so by holding back. It has the capacity to pull us into an area of suspension where we each become engrossed in a world of transparencies, layers and colours, yet it remains cryptic. This is related to how its formal articulate and controlled construction develops and how it evokes the feeling that the artist is working outside of any predetermined and conscious discourse. The fact that Kees Goudzwaard does not seem to have an agenda imbues his practice with a form of fascinating honesty (underlined by the use of oil paint) that is seldom found in contemporary painting. It is as if he were painting for himself by stubbornly trying to defy the imperatives of innovation and development.
This prompts the question of why his work can't be dismissed as a technically perfect and highly seductive and obsessive activity of copying self-made models or why it can't be reduced to an insider's analysis on the contemporary state of painting. I believe, instead, that Goudzwaard's work has such a direct emotional appeal because the painstaking production process is simply a means to an end, which is complex, aesthetical and conceptual. The work's apparent detached and mechanised formal aspect allows the artist to focus on the representation of his own painting process, as a metaphor for the representation of time. By looking at Kees Goudzwaard's work we gain the capacity to imagine time without events: time as a totally abstract monolithic concept. This is why his production process becomes conceptually important while at the same time it cannot be the key to interpret his work and returns to being simply instrumental. It explains why even if Kees Goudzwaard's creativity manifests itself in the first phase of composing the paper and tape collages, it is the slow process of creating the paintings that allows him to capture time as a solid entity. Time outside human history and its accidents becomes the true subject of Kees Goud-zwaard's paintings. This I believe explains the sense of calm and peace that is often associated with the experience of his works, because the extended time of their construction contrasts with the schizophrenic and fragmented relationship to time and reality we experience in our digitalized and virtual world.
Through his practice Kees Goudzwaard questions the acceleration of cultural production and its commodification; it is as if by obsessively reproducing in his perfect paintings a form of suspension he was trying to resist consumption. His works are thus not silent objects but become agents that can whisper to each spectator an atmosphere that testifies to painting's unabashed communicative power.

Footnotes
1. Robert Ryman, in Wall Painting (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1979), p.16.
2. Rosalind E. Krauss, in The Originality of the Avantgarde and Other Modernist Myths.
3. YvesAlain Bois, On Two Paintings by Barnett Newman, in: October. Vol. 108, Spring 2004, p.3.
4. Sebastian Hackenschmidt, 'Beyond Disillusion. Kees Goudzwaard and the dialectical tension of Painting', in the catalogue Kees Goudzwaard - Sequent. Culturgest, Lisbon and Roma publications, Amsterdam 2006, pp.53-61.
5. Rosalind E. Krauss, in The Originality of the Avantgarde and Other Modernist Myths. mit Press, Boston 1986, p.158

paper model for Transit, 2009