Robert Zandvliet: Paradaidha
An extensive solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Darmstadt (DE) showcases the oeuvre of Robert Zandvliet by brining together works from his series Paradaidha.
Robert Zandvliet explores the garden as a microcosm of nature – taking his research into the green paintings of his series of colour studies, from Le Corps de la Couleur to examine the overlapping structures of nature – grasses, trees, leaves and plants. The series is titled Paradaidha, an Old Persian word meaning ‘surrounded garden’ and also the origin of the word ‘paradise’. The series takes the structures of nature to develop large ‘colour fields’, at once flooded with the shifting qualities of light in nature and capturing the essence of the field in its more literal sense. Zandvliet’s paintings capture the unique qualities of light - the fleeting or distorting properties it can hold from the iridescent shimmer of light on water to the ‘Fata Morgana’ phenomenon, creating repeated images at the edge of the horizon. Building on this essence of light in his work, Zandvliet is adapting the central motif of the curved form into his new work, drawing the viewer’s eye across the canvas and capturing the movement of light across the surface as paint metamorphoses into image.
Zandvliet’s Paradaidha works make reference to Claude Monet’s Nymphéas series, painted at his gardens at Giverny in his later life, and notably the bridge that crosses the ponds of water lilies. Just as Monet used these tableaux to focus on core principles of colour, form and the push and pull illusionistic space, Zandvliet looks closely at the motifs within these paintings to deconstruct and rework them in his own inimitable style. Executed in egg tempera and oil, Zandvliet allows the aforementioned bridge to fade gently in to the background, with the foreground dominated by the strident swoop of willow branches, as if clouding the viewer’s vision, and swathes of white to connote movement on top again. Subject is allowed to fade in to gesture, only to reemerge again in a complex composition that teeters between figuration and abstraction.
