Events/Openings

Seemingly lit by glaring headlamps, in Aaron van Erp’s oil painting The Training of Ninjas for the Pending Invasion of Sealand (2012), the silhouettes of the portrayed figures appear in front of a dark background. With a roughly sketched physiognomy, the bodies oscillate between fitness training and torture. As if applied with a swab, nebulous yet with a hypnotic radiance.
In the second solo exhibition of the Dutch artist, FELDBUSCHWIESNER gallery will show new paintings from 2012 and will also present large drawings for the first time.

Revealing human abysses with a corporeality implied by gestures is characteristic for Aaron van Erp’s surreal visual worlds. He constructs a lawless space in his own nihilistic time zone, in which the figures seem to dismember themselves. The landscape in which they operate is a bizarre wasteland, which eludes the comfort zone of modern functionalism. Yet his works are still filled with the products of the contemporary consumer world: beer bottles, meatballs, candy-coloured balloons and lobsters as red as fire extinguishers. He puts these everyday elements in a disconcerting contextual relationship of power, suppression, invasion and persecution. The titles of the works reflect the absurd humour of his visual language. In the painting Allegory of Liberalism with Chair and Burning Caravan (2012), the lynch mob does not even stop short of the Dutch institution of the caravan.
Aaron van Erp’s new drawings on packaging paper show fragmentary scenes that follow the cruel logic of fairy tales. The figures hovering in the space are roughly sketched in gestural black lines while black ink drips out of their wounds and spears divide the pictorial space. The Swimming Instructor (2012) becomes a murderer.

Van Erp draws the immense narrative power of his fiction from the strength of historic positions: the blurry paint application and the surreal pictorial space are a legacy of Francis Bacon, while James Ensor’s idiosyncratic use of the colour palette and the provocativeness of Chaïm Soutine’s motifs are just as evident here. In particular the implied complicity of the viewer is also an element characteristic of these artists’ works. The synergy of these divergent powers creates a peculiarly timeless sphere. Van Erp’s paintings are endless stories, in which scenes are evoked yet the progression of the narration remains uncertain.

The televisions in the paintings are a reference to an omnipresent contemporary phenomenon: media and digital images of terrorist movements, torture and everyday outbreaks of violence pour into the wide-open consciousness of society 24/7. All kinds of portable smart devices multiply this input. Revolutions are filmed live and tweeted and privacy no longer has boundaries. The contents merge in one’s own memory to become a seething stream of visual information that develops unexpected powers.

Aaron van Erp addresses the gaps and cracks in modern perception in a remarkable way. This instability of the gaze is expressed in the gestural painting of the figures, which in the age of digital velocity are permanently in a state of flux, appearing and disappearing. Reality and fiction, victim and tormenter, past and present are inseparably interwoven. The evil aspect of humans hence becomes a flickering phantom, a fluctuating recollection.

Aaron van Erp (*1978, Veghel, NL) studied at the St. Joost Academy of Art in the Dutch city of Hertogenbosch and lives and works in Eindhoven. He has already been represented in numerous international exhibitions.
His works have been shown, amongst others, in extensive solo exhibitions in the Tim van Laere gallery in Antwerp (2012), the João Ferreira Gallery, Capetown (2010), IBID Projects, London (2008), Sperone Westwater, New York (2008), as well as the Stedelijk Museum Hertogenbosch (2007). His group exhibitions include Art Apocalypsis, Kunstverein Gütersloh (2011), Kraftwerk Depot, MARTa, Herford (2011), High Drama, Hugo & Carla Brown Collection, London (2010), and Strange Brew in the Max Lang Gallery, New York (2007). Van Erp’s works are part of renowned collections, including the collection of the Dutch Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Hugo & Carla Brown, London, Andrew & Christine Hall, Southport, SØR Rusche, Oelde, and the collection of MARTa, Herford.