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REALITY IMAGINED
Whenever I couldn't sleep at night, I would go for a walk along the river opposite my house. In the dark landscape the water was black and little lights twinkled in it. I took photos of the water surface with my phone. Using the flash created fascinating images.
As an artist, Ronald Zuurmond sees these images as 'gifts' that chance has thrown into his lap. He makes grateful use of the coincidental sightings and subsequently of his painting technique. Coincidence and technique, he has them both at his disposal. In the studio these nocturnal observations, visions from a dream almost, are developed into a series of paintings. In series form, as he has enjoyed working for the past year.
Ronald Zuurmond needs structure. The coincidental observation from nature becomes an artistic tool in the mind and hands of the painter. This need for order and structure probably has its roots in his earlier academic studies (sociology). Zuurmond is continually questioning himself and tries to find answers and solutions in his systematic research into the same subject. The series of flower motifs could just as easily emanate from nature as from his fantasy or dream world. Reality and imagination, choice and coincidence, artistic inspiration, knowledge and technique, the artist uses these circumstances and this craftsmanship as tools for his paintings to an equal degree.
For the past year Ronald Zuurmond has been working with renewed vitality on an exceptional series of paintings in which this new reality is portrayed astonishingly well and beautifully: Reality Imagined.
Artist:
Ronald Zuurmond's style is the search for the image. The things he paints already exist. He just needs to see them, nonchalantly, out of the corner of his eye. They provide a spark, an opening. The rest is hard work and contemplation. This way of painting could be compared to the work of the poet. The first line of a poem is a free gift, the rest is laborious. Trial and error. The poet comparison also applies in another sense. Just as the poet chooses a form, Zuurmond chooses the painting. A choice such as this provides a restriction within which the possibilities unfold. The freedom you experience through restriction is the paradox of the form. For the poet, it is the sonnet; for him, it is the painting. Ronald Zuurmond is a painter who each time has to work out from scratch how he is going to do it. Each canvas is a step towards the next, the paintings fit together in a way. “When you hit a wall, you have to go back and do it again. Only then do you know for sure. And as soon as you think you are sure about something, it's gone again.”
One word that keeps coming up when talking to Ronald Zuurmond, is space. Technically he creates this space by painting layer upon layer, often over earlier unsuccessful paintings, and here and there scraping the paint off again. As if drawing a curtain. This is done with some speed, which is important in order to maintain the necessary distance from the painting.
For him the space in the painting extends from the front to the back, much more than from left to right. The things he paints have to move in this space, both in the flat surface and in the depth. “You have to have a vista and at the same time feel a resistance that the eye collides with. For me the space is both physical and psychological. As a viewer you must be able to get through this space, you must be able to move with it. You must be able to enter into the space of the painting step by step. It is never about a perspective space with me, I don't want the painting to suggest anything other than it physically is.”
Ronald Zuurmond
Reality Imagined
Opening Friday, September 8
5 pm - 7 pm
artist will be present
