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Lot Essay
An intertwining of carefully-worked Rorschach stains, a snarl of positive and negative space, Heerenlux forms part of Daan van Golden’s most distinctive series. Each of the works, all titled Heerenlux after the artist’s preferred brand of enamel paint, repeats the red-on-white floral pattern of a scrap of fabric van Golden found during his travels in Morocco in the 1970s. Yet in each version the pattern becomes subtly different as the artist re-examines its visual qualities – framing and reframing, shrinking or enlarging, rotating and cropping. Successive elements gain prominence: at times the painting is clearly made up of tessellating sprays of crimson berries; sometimes the pattern collapses into abstraction; then white fish swim in carmine red or pallid birds are silhouetted against a blood-red sky. As the forms flow in and out of focus, Heerenlux induces a quiet and contemplative way of seeing, reflecting the mood of stillness and emptiness in which the artist created this work.
Pattern painting has defined van Golden’s oeuvre – beginning with his earliest precision replications of napkins, handkerchiefs and wrapping paper made in Tokyo in the early 1960s, the artist has worked slowly and methodically on only a handful of patterns. Though the earliest of these – scatterings of regular dots, minute stylised blooms in marching rows – could be linked to European Pop Art, particularly the textile-based work of Sigmar Polke of the 1960s, van Golden is unique in continuing to explore the same motifs again and again, his earliest paintings re-photographed, re-printed, or as in this case, simply painted again. ‘His art mirrors itself,’ Emiliano Battista writes of this tendency, ‘and the layering of reflections reveals an art of references, parallels and allusions founded on Van Golden’s confidence in the aesthetic and signifying reserves of an image, a form, a procedure’ (E. Battista, Daan van Golden Photo Book(s), London 2013, p. 4). In a process of creation which must always reformulate pre-existing or previously used material, Heerenlux marks a circling back which is also a spiralling forward.
Pattern painting has defined van Golden’s oeuvre – beginning with his earliest precision replications of napkins, handkerchiefs and wrapping paper made in Tokyo in the early 1960s, the artist has worked slowly and methodically on only a handful of patterns. Though the earliest of these – scatterings of regular dots, minute stylised blooms in marching rows – could be linked to European Pop Art, particularly the textile-based work of Sigmar Polke of the 1960s, van Golden is unique in continuing to explore the same motifs again and again, his earliest paintings re-photographed, re-printed, or as in this case, simply painted again. ‘His art mirrors itself,’ Emiliano Battista writes of this tendency, ‘and the layering of reflections reveals an art of references, parallels and allusions founded on Van Golden’s confidence in the aesthetic and signifying reserves of an image, a form, a procedure’ (E. Battista, Daan van Golden Photo Book(s), London 2013, p. 4). In a process of creation which must always reformulate pre-existing or previously used material, Heerenlux marks a circling back which is also a spiralling forward.