hendrik dijk
Artists Reviews
Joan D'Arcy
Woodstock Time, March 1998
THE WOODSTOCK GUILD is presenting its second exhibition of the 1998 season called "All in a Day's Work," paintings by Hendrik Dijk at the Kleinert / James Gallery.
Dijk, a Kingston resident and native of Amsterdam, is becoming increasingly known for his large scale geometric paintings.
The main feature of this exhibition is a mural painted directly on the wall of the gallery. This is a powerful tool for allowing the viewer the complete aesthetic experience of walking into a painting. Looking at a Dijk painting is akin to entering a tunnel like a spelunker who discovers step by step the conformations and discoveries to be found beyond what may seem an unassuming entrance.
As he explores the sequence of "rooms" , found in many underground tunnels and their varying height and dimensions, he is intrigued to go further. Perhaps there is an ending. Perhaps not:. The viewer may think of Paul Klee, a painter of the Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) school who taught at the Bauhaus, a school of painting who specialized in logic and the "science" of design."
Klee taught here as well and tended (at that time)'to see the world as a kind of orrery run up by a cosmic clockmaker. Dijk, like Klee, values the art of children (Dijk often has children in his studio and at mural projects to assist him) and, again, like Klee, probably envies their polymorphous freedom to create signs ... emblems to demonstrate ! spiritual truth.
Dijk's work ferrets around in the crannies of culture both European and American and brings back small trophies of botany, astronomy, physics and psychology. Although one cannot "recognize" them; they are there. In some of his paintings, Hendrik Dijk seems influenced by the counterpoint of 18th century music as though the sounds could be translated quite directly into gradations of color and value, repetitions and changes of motif.
He attempts to freeze time in a static composition, to give visual motifs the "unfolding" quality of aural ones. Squares, boxes, grids, triangles, some like linked forms or fanned out like a deck of cards. Dijk is dedicated to the artistic revelation that the only valid reality lies behind the visible. As Klee once said, "the visible world is merely an isolated case in relation to the universe and that there are many more other latent realities ..."
Dijk is on a mission to search out the symbols and metaphors that would make this belief visible. His work declares itself to be a purely mental image. A grid painting may look like Holland's irrigation ditches or the tube-like branches of an ancient grapevine, all entwined , but he translates such things into a language appropriate to the diminutive scale of a child's enchanted world.
Dijk definitely wants to make the world permeable, in the most exact way, which involves a close observation of the natural world embracing the extremes of far and near, the close-up detail and the "cosmic" landscape. A viewer may see Dijk's painting as a Paradiso, a metaphor for Creation itself, with all species growing peaceably together under the eye of a natural or divine order.
Perhaps that is why many viewers of Dijk's art find it very healing. Hendrik Dijk was educated at the Gerrit Reitveld Academie in Amsterdam and holds an MFA from the New York Academy of Art.
by Joan D'Arcy
hendrik dijk
90 abeel street
kingston, ny
12401
(845) 339-0980