Bas Coenegrachts

The artist Bas Coenegracht was born in 1974 and works in the Netherlands. From the maritime and urban traditions of his homelands, he extracts a pool of motives that we see reappearing in his paintings. Coenegracht visits these places in his work which often lie in the middle of our cities, but at the edge of our perception. Shopping arcades, collapsed warehouses, muddy harbor facilities or closed-down train stations, are what mostly interest him: “What I like in these deserted and run down areas is not so much the nostalgia, but the unpredictable forms taken by abandoned space and ruins” he says. “The unpredictable” runs all along the work like a red thread. The motive emerges through the use of several layers of paint, in stark contrast with the surrounding leftovers of architectural exactitude (one might imagine architectural drawings buried under the oil paint) and a lively volatility (green paint drips down a façade like mossy water, through which the artist revives the surface with a virtuose duktus). Coenegracht leans, in this way, to the side of the volatile, the unpredictable and covers the relics of aging architecture with a lively patina. Just as unpredictable as his work process – painting different layers and structures, partly revealed by scratches – are the continuous changes in the real landscape that inspire his motive, causing a certain naturalism to take place which is not strange to him: in a time when human beings turn away from landscape and buildings, these automatically develop further, change color, deform themselves and collapse. To work with the unpredictable means for Coenegracht above all to dedicate himself to exploring future possibilities: he personally experienced these forgotten and overlooked big city places as retreating and inspirational ground. He discovered them as a graffiti-artist and skateboarder and learned to see them as places for experimentation, where daily life becomes unpredictable. His painting continues this tradition. The painting concerns itself intensively with the human surroundings, even if not explicitly showing people. This absence creates an exciting opening for the viewer: the painting leaves space for associations and progressions and offers possibilities for interpretation and identification. “Steel and Volatility” - Jonas Reuber