Through eight new paintings of layered plaster and pigments on wood panels, lending their sculptural physicality, Van Steendam offers physical form to light’s ephemerality. This preoccupation is at the heart of his practice, but to focus solely on light would be to miss his attention to the materiality of these works. Diptych and triptych formats emphasize the constructedness of his chosen support, while also gently alluding to the spiritual aspects of art’s history. Without the symbols, or the spectacular displays of faith, wealth, and suffering — if such scenes were pared back to the essentials of color and light, what fundamental emotional information would remain? The high notes of ecstasy, the steadying beat of devotion, and much else, are coiled within Van Steendam’s chosen form.
A triptych in pale greens and blues resembles water suffused with light. The title, however, Close Call, suggests not an aquatic environment but a narrow escape from some calamity. Not only that, but also a voice beckoning, an invitation to intimacy. Such ambiguity abounds in Van Steendam’s minimalist yet affectingly expressive works. The shades are natural and evoke the organic — these are tinctures of moss, blooming petal, and morning sky — but there is rarely anything concrete. Occasionally, a recognizable natural form appears to push through, as in Cucumber Cubes, where square subsets resemble a tree trunk cut through the middle to determine its age, each ring referring to an era of life.
Largely, though, Van Steendam abandons figurative representation and instead focuses upon light, its pulse and reorganizing capabilities, its transformative effects. Working from his studio in Lisbon, oriented towards the sun and its movements, it is no surprise that Van Steendam is instinctually drawn to light. Electric Teepee presents a translucent square of mint green, a silken latticework through which foamy white light glints, bringing to mind a vast backlit pane of glass. Impressions of this kind accumulate with sustained observation. Coral pink flecks and ribbons of viridian green give Electric Teepee the feel of a sky marked by the aurora borealis or a nebula floating through space. What else? A large field bordered with hedges, long grass and wildflowers through which wind gently moves. A pond, meadows, a wall covered in moss. Frames and Wheels, another diptych structure, is organized into a grid similar to that of Cucumber Cubes, and both suggest the patterns made by light through window shades, their bands of color vibrating to subtly different rhythms. Pillow Talk and Impossible Dreams situate us in early mornings or late nights as a hymn to light’s various atmospheric effects, its daily spectacular choreography: sunrises, sunsets; darkness illuminated by starlight.
These meditations on color inevitably address a history of its theorizing. In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Colors (1810), the poet states that color is not simply an effect of light, a visual phenomenon, but an emotional force too. Goethe proceeds to identify the affective characteristics of colors and their admixtures: yellow brings joy, for instance, while red-blue disturbs. In Van Steendam’s paintings, color is so multitudinous it is impossible to obey any single tenet set forth by Goethe’s color psychologies. In Close Call, streaks of dusky blues, chartreuse, sage green, tangerine and violet touch and intertwine. If, as Goethe argues, ‘particular colors excite particular states of feeling,’ what emotion arises from turquoise that melts into red? The answer is ambiguous, shifting, but that uncertainty is part of these paintings’ pleasures. Following Goethe’s linking of color and feeling, you might say that filling these paintings with such a wealth of different colors instils them with a huge chorus of different energies, emotions and ideas. A daub of carrot orange, like those which move across Tire Shop, might provoke happiness only for a cerulean blue to overtake that emotion moments later, the eye having moved elsewhere. As in the natural world, which is vulnerable to atmospheric changes and quotidian planetary shifts, in Van Steendam’s paintings transformations are commonplace. Yet the cumulative effect is not of disquiet, but of repletion: all forms of life and its flourishing are accounted for — even if as flashes, samples, glimmering fragments — in these paintings.
Each work has this urgent sense of the present, of engaging a viewer’s mind and sensory capacities. At the same time, these paintings possess a historical quality in as much as they bear traces of their own long processes of composition. Works are built up with layers of raw pigment and plaster, creating transparencies through which some of the earliest gestures are visible underneath its final touches. Van Steendam’s hand is visible, in other words, and the result are paintings whose tactility lends them a remarkable sense of intimacy. Such closeness might feel unexpected in works that are in some key sense enigmatic, eluding conventional description, eschewing narrative. Mysticism clings to these work’s edges almost by chance or accident. In certain moods, they can appear like portals to other worlds. Bands of color have an architectural aspect that brings to mind thresholds real and imagined. Color appears to tremble and waver, as though it were a substance that might be entered, as though a strange gravity were dragging you inside.
Yet these works are always suffused with references to real places Van Steendam has visited, lived or worked. The vast and empty skies of Marfa, its distinctive oranges and pinks, colors through which it is impossible not to feel the desert’s heat, act as a backdrop to Impossible Dreams and Pillow Talk. Van Steendam’s travels in Egypt gently influence several of the works in this presentation but feel especially pertinent to Frames and Wheels and Cucumber Cubes. Vividly preserved painted tombs of the pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings reveal the vibrancy of ancient artists’ range of colors, and something of this vividness is reflected in Van Steendam’s palette. In the desert, along the banks of the Nile River, in Lisbon; in pastures, oceans, skies and glittering celestial bodies. Van Steendam ranges across these terrains, but no matter where his painting takes us, he always delivers on vivid, sensual color experiments and the endlessly fascinating play of light.
REBECCA BIRRELL, 2024
Travelling along uncontaminated paths in a natural background, through hot dry desert landscapes, coming across narrow, impervious, hidden and secret paths, traced by the perpetual flow of men and animals: this is the origin of the essence of Down the trail, by Stan Van Steendam (1985), the Belgian artist’s second solo exhibition in the gallery.
According to this perceptual experience, which is characterised by a powerful meditative dimension, we often find ourselves in the condition of having to select the stimuli at which we pay attention. This process can only take place if we use the different sensory inputs available to us (such as the auditory, visual, etc.), in relation to the different sensory features typical of the stimulus, namely: position, colour, shape, transparency, shade, segment and so forth.
Stan Van Steendam’s enigmatic, iconic and visceral work challenges all our ideas, all the established notions of both tradition and modernity. The results are delicate sculptural virtuosity and gentle monochromatic investigations. His work, of an intuitive nature, aims to deconstruct the materiality of painting that he explores through an extensive process of layering raw pigments, plaster and epoxy resin on wood in addition to other materials such as ash, dirt and dust. It creates a new idea of the pictorial tradition, which definitely enables new perceptual experiences. All these materials lend a liberating approach to his practice as they themselves arbitrarily choose a self-moulding direction of both form and colour variation. Down the trail emphasises a broader concept of the sculptural work, moving towards an idea of total experience.
Van Steendam currently lives between Brussels and Lisbon. Lisbon has particularly influenced his work over the last two years, especially because of the dystopian and desert-like atmosphere of the industrial area where he lives, called Barreiro.
His minimalist compositions are highly intuitive, material and tactile, reflecting a propensity for meditation that certainly requires a state of absolute calm. Enormous monochromatic, iridescent, luminous and vibrant paintings, extending into space, question, as already mentioned, the definitions of all traditional categories. Since Van Steendam’s research is based on the material construction of the surface, it has to be understood as a process that is both physical and meditative, in which the only creative instrument used by the artist himself is his bare hands. Moreover, the resulting tumultuous perception, in perfect balance between mystery and ambiguity, continues to change according to the reflection of both light and cerulean skies on the same material surface.
In this latest cycle of works, through thorough recuperation activities, the materials unquestionably constitute that primary path which constantly insinuates itself into the creative process, passing with agility from one painting to another, establishing its trueessence. Through our senses and the perceptive experiences that the senses trigger in us, we can hopefully become aware of the world that surrounds us to the extent that we are able to understand its fundamental aspects. The perceptual experience in which Van Steendam invites us to participate is intended as a primary source of knowledge of the world, which is interpreted as an environment. It is a phenomenon that is as familiar from the point of view of our immediate consciousness as it is enigmatic from the point of view of reflection on the transcendental.
DOMENICO DE CHIRICO, 2022
Arid is an exhibition by Stan Van Steendam (Belgium, 1985) that features three works that occupy the gallery walls and establish a dialogue around a place of transition. Overlapping density and rarefaction, vibration and contain- ment, the open and the hidden, Van Steendam inquires about the constitution of painting in an operation that takes place between the body of an object and its pictorial surface.
Exploring a logic of deposition in which the materials’ nature, context, and work produce their inherent imtages and shapes, the pieces are made horizontally, on a worktable, close to the artist’s body. On a wooden base that stands as a starting point, Van Steendam applies pigment, plaster and dust collected from his studio’s surroundings. In this process, time and gravity create a logic of strata, which expresses both chance and choice, that marks a path that is made between composition and happening.
The larger work, Cane (2022), is a painting / object of an environmental and contemplative nature that demarcates a centre and a surrounding halo. Asking for the viewer’s attention, the work expresses a hot, dry and pale existence, subtly revealing the fingers and gestures that gave it form. Breathing colour, the shapes within shift and change as they follow its underlying geometry. The closeness it asks for and its intrinsic workmanship emanate a slow time that summons a connection that pleads for a growing availability. Affirming its presence in the gravity well of the viewer’s gaze, the work inhabits an intermediate space between what is hidden and what is revealed, what calls for us and what goes away.
The other two works in the exhibition, Saunter (2022) and Peer (2022), take on a rectangular shape that we quickly associate with the world of painting. In them, the main surface is coated with a layer of epoxy resin that seals it with a homogeneous texture. Contrary to the previous example, the expression on the sides takes on greater intensity here, revealing the work process and its specificities. Saunter and Peer can be read as a sequence of steps, with dialogic tops; a crease and a groove. In both cases, when the resin closes the composition, the gloss seals the base, reflects our gaze and allows for a faster, but more distant, appropriation.
In these three works, whether in the lateral thickness of their layers, in the stains and lines on their surfaces, in the glossiness that redirects our gaze back to us, or in the quietness that invites deeper examination, the articulation of the forms produces an unstable and elusive apprehension. Each part reorganizes (itself in) the constitution of the whole, between what is hidden and what is suggested, between the mask and the explanation. In this way, Van Steendam investigates an emphatic intermediate state, difficult to circumscribe, somewhere between purpose and effect, dwelling on an entity set between will and consequence, between its body and its surface.
The management of this delicate balance is the result of a state in which the nature of the elements and the artist’s presence coincide in the wholeness of the work. In this sense, these pieces are the consequence of their intrinsic physical dimension, but also of the artist’s intuition, and his meditative process. A kind of mutual ambience: interior and exterior, intense and arid, like the inebriant light of the morning.
SÉRGIO FAZENDA RODRIGUES, 2022