A homage to Jan Andriesse

In the Main Section of the fair, the Borzo Gallery is presenting a homage to Jan Andriesse, the painter who wanted to create ‘shamelessly beautiful paintings’ and who was fascinated by the workings of light throughout his life. Averse to trends, Andriesse worked on his houseboat on the Amstel to create a body of work that was as idiosyncratic as it was consistent.

At the Borzo stand, three paintings from Andriesse’s estate are on display, alongside several Water Studies—pen drawings of light reflections on the Amstel—and new work by Andriesse’s friend and colleague Jurriaan Molenaar.

Until his death in 2021, Jan Andriesse was a key figure in Dutch painting. His best-known work is his series of rainbow paintings on large canvases, which he began on in 1994. The first rainbow was created for a conference room at the Council of State, but the commission was not granted. “I wondered what the most beautiful thing was that I could give the queen to look at. After months of consideration, I arrived at a rainbow. After all, what is more beautiful than a rainbow?” The De Pont Museum in Tilburg would later exhibit and ultimately purchase the work.

With his rainbow paintings, Andriesse ventured into terra incognita. You would think there had been predecessors dedicated to painting the rainbow, but this was not the case: he was the only one. This discovery came with its own challenges, as all colours in a rainbow have the same lightness, but paint does not. To ensure the intensity of all colours was equally strong, Andriesse sometimes worked for months on end on a single painting. Every day, he would apply a new layer of acrylic paint mixed with marble powder. “If it took 200 days, that meant 200 layers. It sounds absurd, but it’s true,” Andriesse told NRC. These countless layers are not visible on the surface of his canvases, which are always smoothly polished, but only along the edges.

Partly due to the large size of the canvases—the rainbow at Museum Jan Cunen measures 190.5 x 300 cm—and the slow process, Andriesse’s legacy is not extensive. Gallery owner Paul van Rosmalen estimates that besides the Water Studies, only around ten paintings remain. Three of these are being offered at Art Rotterdam for the first time.

Andriesse was born in 1950 in Jakarta. He spent his childhood in El Salvador before moving to the Netherlands. In 1968, he began studying at the Free Academy in The Hague and later, in the early 1970s, continued his studies at Ateliers ’63 in Haarlem. In the early 1970s, he moved to Canada and then illegally to New York, where he lived and worked for eight years.

To make ends meet, he worked as a house painter in Manhattan office buildings. Reflecting in 2000, he called New York the place where he learned the most about the workings of paint and colour. “I saw the spatial effect of colour and how colour can have weight. I saw what a cold neutral white can do on a large surface and how warm white can be when mixed with pink, yellow or orange.”

On the Amstel
When he moved into his studio on a houseboat on the Amstel in 1986, he knew he had found all he needed in this place. The houseboat had several skylights that allowed daylight to stream in unimpeded. This enabled Andriesse to study the interplay of paint, light and colour in detail.

The houseboat also offered views of the Weesperzijde. One evening, he saw the reflected light of the streetlamps converging at a point in the Amstel. He couldn’t believe his eyes, but consulted Marcel Minnaert’s The Nature of Light and Color in the Open Air (1937), which precisely described the phenomenon he had just witnessed. “Depending on the wind, the ripples carry the light. It is oxygen, it is space, it is change. It is continuous change. It lives; you could almost say light moves.”

Uninfluenced by trends
Jan Andriesse was a striking figure. A tall man with Schubert-style glasses and a sonorous voice, he preferred to dress in white. His ideas were equally as distinctive. He was a homo universalis in an era increasingly focused on specialisation. Like artists centuries ago, he made no distinction between art and science. In his view, there was as much beauty in theoretical physics as in a painting by Vermeer or Weissenbruch, two painters he admired.

He incorporated several geometric and mathematical principles into his work, such as Kepler’s Triangle and the Golden Ratio. About using the Golden Ratio, he said, “It’s a proportion that is useful for me because it naturally generates possibilities, almost outside of myself. The more my ego and neuroses are absent in my work, the better.”

Because of this absence in his work, gallery owner Paul van Rosmalen describes Andriesse’s work as introverted. Not everyone is receptive to the combination of calm and movement. You shouldn’t expect grand gestures in Andriesse’s work. But that doesn’t mean he had no intention behind his work: “I want to paint perfect stillness, a form of stasis as it were, without making you fall asleep, something that is still a pleasure to look at. I want to make my paintings shamelessly beautiful.”

Written by Wouter van den Eijkel