hendrik dijk
Artists Reviews
Little Boxes
by Todd Paul
Chronogram, October 1997
Before attending the Gerrit Rietveld Academic of the Arts, in Amsterdam, Hendrik Dijk worked in a factory. He saw what factory work can do to people: years of staring at the same walls, making the same movements. He painted watercolor flowers and sold them to his co-workers for a few dollars apiece, as an antidote to madness. Dijk now lives and paints in Kingston, where he has a studio in the same converted industrial building that houses R&F Encaustics and several other artist's studios. He and his wife moved here from the Netherlands several years ago, and fell in love with the area. Kingston is in the formative stages of an arts renaissance, and studio rents are cheap.
Though no longer working in a factory or painting in a boiler room, the affects and aesthetics of the industrial age show clearly in Dijk's art. He has recently completed a series of large canvasses divided into neat rows of abutting boxes: each box, open in the front, pulls the viewer into the distance of its perspective, some deeper, some shallower, some skewed to one side or another. Dijk also plays with light and shadow, and with warm and cool colors, to change the feeling the viewer gets from the painting. In one vertical panel, the stacked boxes suggest a high-rise apartment building, the cubicled hive of the working class. In a smaller, darker work. the viewer seems to be presented with a choice: which door to open? Which identical cubicle to choose, or is there another choice, one outside the painting?
While these works replicate, in some ways, the environment of the factory or modern office, they also suggest an imaginative freedom to impose content on what are essentially empty forms. Almost immediately, one's inner eye supplies figures to fill the boxes. Referring to his cubes as screens. Dijk says of one painting: "What this tells me is you have these different screens, so you make your own movie." He connects his work with the free expression of '60s art, but adds. "I am unashamedly creating illusion." His dream now is to create a series of paintings for factory walls, where they might serve as an imaginative release for workers. He has just completed a large mural, "Phragm," on the wall of The Loft, as part of his upcoming show. The Loft is located on Broadway in Kingston .
by Todd Paul
Chronogram, October 1997
hendrik dijk
90 abeel street
kingston, ny
12401
(845) 339-0980