Study H.M.

From a background of powdery blue, Daan van Golden conjures the flattened, abstracted silhouette of a parakeet – its tail a sliver of white, its rounded head nestling on its breast. In its elegant simplicity, this form is recognisable as the single parakeet resident in Henri Matisse’s cut-out jungle La Perruche et la Sirène, 1952, and it is the initials of the older artist that van Golden refers to in the title of this work, Study H.M. The elongated motif of the bird marked van Golden’s return to painting in the 1980s, after a decade of absence: initially intent on reproducing the entirety of Matisse’s 7-metre masterpiece, in 1981, 1982 and again in 1985, the artist produced Blue Studies After Matisse, each featuring only the monochrome silhouette of the parakeet on an unpainted white ground. In an oeuvre which is best understood as a multiplication of echoes and self-references, van Golden returned to the parakeet again and again – making it small or large, red or blue – stripping it of its original meaning and instead making its silhouette a meditation on the interaction of form and void.
The wavering edge, where the white is as if washed by a lapping sea of blue, was originally the result of a projector mis-rendering the appropriated image. Meticulously reproduced by the artist from one Study H.M. to the next, here what van Golden refers to as the ‘touched’ and ‘untouched’ areas of the canvas meet in an encounter between space and emptiness. At long scrutiny – and van Golden was a particularly slow painter – figure and space become interchangeable, the border between them not so much a demarcation, as a mutable moment of mystery. Imbued with this meditative energy, Study H.M. becomes dynamic: though its form is replicated, each iteration appears as a mark of the passage of time, the progression of a body of work and the evolution of a way of thinking and being.