Harm van Ee

 

Landscapes unfolded

 

Harm van Ee paints landscapes. On a small scale he suggests wide panoramas in bright surfaces and lines, blue-green or chiefly yellow with purplish red keynotes. Made abstract yet just recognizable, they are, these lanes mountaintops and cloudy skies. Motorways. Vistas. The sea in pocket size, a souvenir you may carry with you.

 

Van Ee’s landscapes are universal. Someone might very well recognize an Afghan desert or a Norwegian fjord, but the painter was never there. Colour is often dependent on the time of day and the weather; shadows are cast or the scorching Spanish or Portuguese sun has left its traces. Protagonists are the Dutch and French coasts, the Pyrenees or the French hills around Le Gers in south Cascogne, where the painter often sojourns.

    Sometimes a photograph inspires a painting, but ideally the painted landscape creates itself, a fictive landscape that corresponds to reality in atmosphere rather than in detail. Within five minutes the essence of such a landscape may change. On this scale every new stroke is decisive.

    The isolated images in van Ee’s fictitious road movie are points of disappearance that bear witness to a longing for elsewhere. They are picture postcards he sends to himself and to the world, both hindsight and preview. And on a scale that reinforces a personal point of view for both the painter and the spectator.

 

Van Ee’s paintings are a series of travelogues that might be just around the corner along the river Spaarne, like Ruysdael’s ‘Haerlempjes’ (views of Haarlem), though unmistakably contemporary.

    Unbleached colours, as fresh as sensory registrations, these are imaginary worlds partly visited and partly observed in the mind’s eye. Always there is tension between water and sky, between foreground and horizon. A lane ever so slightly out of line.

    Striking detail: the miniatures were made on leftover invitation cards for the ‘Vishal’ gallery; thus they are invitations to new points of view, these vistas by van Ee, strung together to the zigzag film sequence of a leporello.

 

Text : Renée Borgonjen, art historian.

English translation : Joost Ides, teacher of Art and English.