hendrik dijk
Artist review
Hendrik Dijk's magic with that "awful seventies orange"
by Lynn
Woods
Jan. 27, 2003
On a recent frigid afternoon in January, Hendrik Dijk's Kingston studio is bathed in cold winter light. It's located on the ground floor of the "19th century firehouse he and his wife, Maria, meticulously restored. The white walls and battleship-gray concrete floor, reminiscent of the pewter skies and seas of Dijk's native Friesland, in the north of Holland, echo the patches of fading sky framed in the high windows of the large double doors facing the street. Set against this elemental neutrality, Dijk's paintings and color studies, hung on either wall above rows of flat, industrial-style radiators, glow with plangent intensity.
They are an eclectic assortment: on one wall is a long skinny
canvas, hung horizontally, of vertical bands of saturated color.
A similar piece is suspended vertically, which changes the eye's
appraisal completely: The fields of color seem to jog each other, like the
projected frames of a jammed film strip. On the opposite wall is a series of
colored squares arranged in a grid; several small square landscapes, each
depicting a view of a river valley or fiord, whose interior luminosity and lack
of specificity evoke a sense of mysterious timelessness; and dozens of tiny
luminist landscapes on 3-3/4" square wood blocks. Two photo-collages of a
dilapidated National Airlines billboard lie on a large table strewn with small
canvases and papers.
Dijk credits Gerardt Richter as setting the example that enabled artists to break the specialist mold and instead work simultaneously in different styles, without stigma. Indeed, the works on the anterior part of the two walls seem to speak to a different sensibility entirely. On one wall, six monumental "columns" each is a 13-by-72-inch painting hover like bars of colored light, each sounding a particular chord. Nearby are propped several square paintings depicting colored grids. The works all belong to a series Dijk started in 1998. They are among his most ambitious works and exemplify his quest to marry geometric form with expressive color, thereby stimulating in the viewer a sensation of balance, expansiveness and spiritual elation. "I use form as a reason for color," he says. Without the proper form, "the colors are weak and don't speak to you.
Almost 100 years ago Kasimir Malevich, in his non-objective compositions, first expressed the idea that the essence and spirituality of art resides in the abstract components of color and geometric shapes. Dijk's countryman Piet Mondrian furthered that notion when he noted, in 1945: "The culture of particular form is approaching its end. The culture of determined relations has begun." A generation later, the reductive, monumental color-field paintings of Mark Rothko, Bamett Newman, and Morris Louis created a new paradigm, of color as a direct experience of the sublime.
While Dijk's interest in the healing and transcendent qualities of non-objective art would seem to align him with the constructivists and color-field painters, superficially, at least, the geometric severity, smooth brushwork, and cool reserve of his work identifies him with 1960s hard-edged painting. Yet Dijk's use of illusionism distances his work from Kenneth No land's targets and Frank Stella's pinstripes, which reduced the canvas to its flat essentials and stripped it of mysticism.
Dijk had long been painting architecturally inspired grids whose illusionistic shadows and tilted planes seemed to telescope space. The artist, who studied architecture for two years at Gerrit Rietveld Academie, in Amsterdam, says he sees his paintings contextually. How they fit into the architectural environment is a concern that relates his work to the De Stijl and Bauhaus movements, both of which incorporated all the arts and explored their organic interconnectiveness.
The new series is radically flatter, yet Dijk chose a motifÑthe cylinder that depicts a three-dimensional form. Why a cylinder, rather than a stripe? "I want to use illusion to draw people into the work," he says, adding that by doing this he is also being true to the creative process: "By using the illusionistic aspect I'm being very honest, because the creative mind is illusionistic in nature." (Recall Leonardo da Vinci's advice to artists that they create drawings out of the pattern of cracks in old walls and his observation that when men pee on a wall, "the acid forms a rim and you can see mountains.")
Susan, named after a fiber artist who once worked in his studio, was his first attempt to experiment with the cylinder as a receptacle for color relationships. Dividing the overall square into nine quadrangles, he played around with various color combinations by buttressing either side of a light central band with narrower stripes of darkening tones of a complementary color. In Holland "which followed Herringbone 1, a dense interweaving of 49 cyclindrical units, resembling spools of thread, that served as a kind of expanded color study Dijk refined the nine fields, darkening the edges along the central band and narrowing and increasing the number of stripes, to create a more subtle transition from tone to tone. The result is that more depth is conveyed, with the stripes in some of the sections such as the magenta-and-green combination in the upper left-receding into space like the flutes of a column. "The painting has more integrity," Dijk says. "The center form hovers" creating a sense of movement both within each cylinder and between the units. "Kineticism is the next step after illusion."
The sense of forms dissembling themselves to create new patterns reaches a climax in Herringbone II. Similar to Op Art in the insistence with which the eye refutes the fact of the flat grid and picks out three-dimensional herringbone patterns, in which the gray interstices of the grid seem to bend and contort, the painting yet resists fixedness of any kind; the patterns that surge forth quickly obliterate themselves as the eye moves around the canvas. Dijk says the kinetic effect derives from a syncopation in the painting's structure: each unit of three cylindrical color areas, which comprise the building blocks of the painting (there are a total of 45, none of them the same), are equal in dimension to four squares.
In Pillars 1, Dijk took a more sculptural approach, isolating
three cylindrical units, each comprised of a 
complementary pair of colors, into separate, columnar-like
canvases. The darkened edges on either side of the central radiating
bandÑbright yellow set into magenta on the left, neutral gray in green
in the center, and pale pink in turquoise on therightÑhave a graphic
quality, suggesting a sense of reserve in this otherwise powerful chromatic
statement. Indeed, Dijk's sensibility as a colorist hails from the North. His
works emit a cool glow. The bars of color in Holland recall the tulip fields in
Dijk's homeland, and the strength of his blues, which seem to inform the works'
overall cast of light, perhaps is rooted in the maritime views of his native
town. Various shades of blue suffuse Mama Bomb, which followed Pillars I. In
this work, the artist did away with complementaries and instead carved out
cylinders using the tonal variations of a single hue, in order to get a more
vibrant effect. Pointing to the harsh orange in one section of Mama Bomb, Dijk
comments that the color is like "a fire burning." The sensation in an adjoining
blue section is entirely different: the central band of pale blue is like a
slice of the sky, viewed between two trees. In a number of his works, blue is
the antidote to the claustrophobic heat of orange.
Indeed, Dijk's best works express a strange dichotomy: harmony is created out of seemingly dissonant elements. The colors are electric, almost in opposition to the Matissean realm of sensual repose and paradisiacal southern light, yet the whole emits a sense of radiating calm and balance. The geometries are austere, yet there is a sense of richness and abundance.
A natural colorist, Dijk works against tus own instincts,On occasion by choosing to incorporate into a work the most off-putting colors. "I cannot live with this," Dijk says of the orange canvas in Painting Group 7, a group of nine canvases, each divided into four quadrangles and depicting a single color through a series of light and dark tones arranged in striations. Along with the orange, he extracted and copied a strident pink and green from previously painted works on the basis of their "impossibility." "They don't allow me in or out, they don't talk to each other." To balance the colors and create a sense of release, Dijk had to add six other canvases to the groupÑone in a red and the remainder in various shades of blue and purple.
Context, then, is everything: any color can be beautiful when it is placed in the proper relationship. "Every color has a spirit, and it can't be judged to be bad." Creating a successful color harmony is a matter of arranging the colors in a particular relation to each other and achieving a careful balance between warm and cool, hard and soft, light and dark. Dijk cites Bauhaus teacher Johannes Itten: "He said there were three levels of relating to color. One is you copy the color of your master, the second is you use colors you like, and the third is you use colors that the situation asks for." The latter point is, he adds, "the door. It's out of the realm of subjective color. You don't like the color, but it vibrates with other colors. The moment you just use colors you like, you have a K-Mart cake. It's too sweet and makes you feel heavy."
Dijk's preoccupation with color perception is never at the expense of the object itself; he eschews airbrushes and other "cold" methods of production in favor of the hand-painted and organic. Close up, his paintings reveal themselves to be surprisingly fragile, with the edges of each striation applied freehand in paint that has the transparency almost of watercolor. In places tiny patches of the white ground show through and the edges waver slightly, revealing the pressure and movement of the artist's hand. He uses raw umber or burnt umber to create the darker tones, thereby avoiding the harshness of black. "If you look at my painting from 50 feet away, then peer at it from three feet, you get another painting," he says.
Pillars II, the six large columnar canvases arranged on the wall to form a single resonating square, started out with the orange canvas, positioned on the right. Dijk describes it as "awfulÑit's totally seventies." He succeeded, however, in transforming that unpleasantness into a necessary strength by balancing the orange with the deeper red on the left and four intervening canvases in cool tones of blue and green. He sees the work as a kind of emotional tuning fork, in which "your feeling shifts as you move from color to color." Ideally, it would be viewed from a distance of least 50 feet, at which point the tonal lines describing each cylinder disappear and each canvas translates into a bar of pulsating color. In Pillars II, Dijk perhaps best achieves his aim of transforming color into light, thereby incarnating the force of nature. "You have to feel light in my paintings, or I'm not satisfied," he says.
Hendrik Dijk's magic with that "awful seventies orange"
by Lynn
Woods
Jan. 27, 2003
hendrik dijk
90 abeel street
kingston, ny
12401
(845) 339-0980