Gérard A. Goodrow
From a Distance The Recent Paintings of Eddy De Vos (2002)
(Text referred also to the recent drawings „Into violence...“ (2011)
There's an old saying of comfort in many countries and cultures that "things look different from a distance". From broken relationships and personal crises to political actions and historical events, problems and issues seem to take on less overpowering dimensions when we take a few steps back and review them through the distance of time. Things seem to fall into perspective as we slowly uncover and understand the situations and events that led up to the problems in question. The problems and issues become relativised, and in some cases even neutralised, when we no longer find ourselves caught up in their very epicentre. From a distance, we can finally focus on their various causes as well as their numerous effects, both positive and negative. From a distance, we find the solutions.
These cross-cultural truisms borrowed from popular psychology - of taking a step back, re-examining problems from a distance, things falling into perspective and becoming neutralised through a shift in focus - might just be the key to understanding Eddy De Vos' most recent paintings. At close inspection difficult to read and almost abstract, they slowly open themselves up and become quite legible when we, as viewers, take a step back and look at them once again from a distance. The jagged, blurry lines that distort our view from close-up reveal themselves to be pixels or the lines of electronic interference that sometimes distort the images on a television screen. From a distance, however, they become neutralised and the images depicted becomes so clear that we wonder why we didn't see them properly in the first place.
In "Dallas - 1963", for example, we slowly make out a long convertible with two passengers in the back seat as it drives past a telephone pole. Through the title, we infer that what we actually seeing is that horrific image of the assassination of John F. Kennedy at the moment when his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy holds him in her arms just seconds before she attempt to flee across the back of the car. Likewise, in "Poland - 1944", the brown earth tones and complex network of diagonals recall at first glance the all-over paintings of Jackson Pollock. From a distance, however, we make out the ominous gate of the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz with its foreboding greeting welded across the top: "Arbeit macht frei".
The meanings of other images are less obvious for many viewers, regardless of how much distance lies between them and the respective painting. In such cases, we can make out the imagery easily enough, but have too little historical knowledge to decipher its origins and significance. One case in point is the luscious green image of a hunter and an elephant: "Belgian Congo - 1958". For an American like me, born in New Jersey in 1964, this small hint from the artist leads me to a dead end. I don't know what happened in Belgian Congo in 1958 and don't really know where to begin looking to find out moreabout what actually took place. And to be honest, I don't really care. In the context of the other paintings, I know that it must represent something of importance. By the same token, however, and equally through the context of the other paintings, I know that it's not important that I know what the image actually represents. For the longer I look at the paintings and think about their true meaning, the more I discover that it's not about the image depicted, but rather the way in which that image is represented. This also explains why so many diverse and seemingly non-connected images can preoccupy the artist at one given time. Through their diversity alone, I know that it cannot be a matter of the individual events - no one is that politically minded! Nevertheless, there is something that unites them, both historically and artistically.
Eddy De Vos does not practise politics with his paintings, even though the majority of them - at least those from the last two years - depict images of disturbing historical events that have become in many cases icons of political milestones. He neither condones nor criticises the events taking place in these images. He merely uses them, appropriates them, to investigate, experiment and analyse his own ideas of what painting is and can be today in the age of the plethora of global, digital images. This is, of course, nothing new in and of itself. As early as the 1960s, both Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol had already transgressed this tightrope between political imagery and a neutral stance toward this. And there are many parallels between these three painters that cannot be downplayed. Nevertheless, De Vos opens new, previously unseen perspectives with his most recent work, both in terms of his painting style and, more importantly, in the context of the digital age of image manipulation and the effects of this on the reading and making of history.
In his perhaps most profound work with mass-distributed political imagery, "October 18, 1977" from 1988, Gerhard Richter presents us with fifteen grisaille paintings depicting people and scenes associated with the tragic events surrounding and leading up to the deaths of the German terrorists Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. The paintings derive from newspaper photographs, television footage and police archives. Painted in Richter's typical blurred method, and reduced to tones of black and grey, the images are, in most cases, difficult to decipher, whereby the horror of the events and the tragedy of the terrorists' deaths come across quite clearly. But like De Vos, Richter's primary concern was in no way in painting a series of political images. He merely appropriated a series of poignant images in an attempt to further his own investigations on the possibilities of painting in the age of Post-Modernism. In his notes from 1988, Richter stresses: "The pictures might raise questions about a political statement or an historical truth. Both are of no interest to me." (In: H.-U. Obrist (ed.), "Gerhard Richter. Text", Frankfurt am Main 1996, p. 165.) This doesn't, of course, stop art historians and critics from stressing the political content of these works, as was the case in Richter's current retrospective, in the catalogue of which a parallel was drawn between these paintings and the tragic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Andy Warhol's infamous "Disaster" series from the early 1960s also comes to mind. It too has frequently been misinterpreted as pure social commentary, a kind of "heavy pop", which ostensibly contradicts the stereotypically "feel-good pop" that we tend to associate with the movement in general and the artist in particular. Warhol's silk-screened paintings of race riots, car crashes, electric chairs and suicides are, like Richter's Baader-Meinhof series and Eddy De Vos' recent paintings, borrowed from photojournalistic sources; and for all three artists it is important that the images be part of popular culture and the collective consciousness of contemporary history. If there is any socio-political statement to be made at all with Warhol's scenes of death and destruction, then not with regard to the images themselves, but rather to the way we perceive them - or not, as the case may be. "Familiarity breeds indifference" might be the motto behind such works. What is interesting, however, is that these paintings, generally presented with multiple images, not only recall film, but actually immediately precede his own films, which he began in the late 1960s. It is thus the formal, sequential nature of these images that probably interested him the most. And, like Richter, he frequently denied any political stance whatsoever in his numerous, albeit enigmatic, interviews.
Like Warhol's "Race Riot" from 1963, which depicts a brutal police action against black demonstrators in the spring of 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, De Vos' "Saigon - 1963", which depicts a Buddhist monk in flames, tells us nothing about what is actually going on in the image, nor is it used to persuade us to sympathise with one side or another. It is merely a statement of fact, as if to say: "this exists". But more than that, it is an attempt to create an image that is powerful enough to capture our attention, only to draw us in so that we can be confronted with ideas surrounding the nature of painting itself. For many years now, Eddy De Vos has borrowed his imagery from reality, whereby, like Richter and Warhol, it is rarely the image itself, or the thing being represented, that interests him, but rather the appearance of the image, its formal composition and visual possibilities. In the late 1990s, his paintings depicted anonymous drug addicts, fighter planes and ruins - but also landscapes, nudes and architecture. In his most recent paintings, the images are seldom anonymous. On the contrary, they are all integral parts of our common visual culture and heritage. But - and this is a very important "but" - because we know the imagery so well, we tend to look beyond it to see how it was represented, to see how it was actually painted. In this sense, they could just as easily be abstract. What we see is not an objective document of the respective event, but rather one possible way of seeing it, nothing more, nothing less. In doing so, De Vos raises important questions about visual and cognitive perception.
How do we see the world today? For most of us, our visual perception of global events is filtered through digital photography and television reports, in many cases dominated by CNN. We have already learned through the teachings of Post-Modernism that we cannot and should not accept as pure truth what we see in the media. Any image can be manipulated, either through digitisation or through context. There are at least two sides to every story, and in the age of digital technology, the manipulation of imagery has become the norm. De Vos' paintings discuss this state of visual filtering without either embracing or rejecting it. As with the images themselves, the artist remains neutral in this regard. He doesn't accuse computer technology of destroying painting, nor does he welcome it as an aesthetic tool. He merely accepts it as a fact, as a new way of visually perceiving the world around us. The way we see the world today is different from the way we saw it in the days before the computer was omnipresent in all facets of daily life. And thus,
logically and consequently, the way we see paintings must also have been altered as a result.
The scale of the paintings plays an equally significant role. Because they are generally so large, they consume our entire field of vision. We need to take a step back, if only to be able to see the whole image in its entirety. Those paintings that are smaller, on the other hand, tend to correspond with the dimensions of television screens, thus underscoring the medial nature of their origins. In any event, either physically or metaphorically, we need to put some distance between the paintings and ourselves as viewers. We need to take a step back and put them into perspective.
Furthermore, the fact that the paintings are generally monochrome neutralises them by avoiding the subjective sentimentality of colour, as well as the presumed objectivity of black and white. This too is a balancing act. Do the brown earth tones of "Poland - 1944", the luscious green tones of "Belgian Congo - 1958", the ochre tones of "Jordan - 1970", or even the soft blue tones of "Display", which depicts a nude girl dancing, have anything at all to do with the contents depicted in the images? Is there some connection between the colour and the subject matter? Probably... but that's not important. What is important, however, is that they are not black and white, since these non-colours inevitably lead us to accept a high degree of objectivity, which we know in our hearts to be a lie.
And this leads us to the artist's interest in cognitive perception. It is not just what we see through the biological mechanism of the human eye, but also how our brain - or better, our consciousness - translates these images into meanings. Thus, what you see, I see as well, although we both interpret what we see quite differently. It all depends on our own personal stance, what we know and what we believe in. Historical facts do not really exist as such, for here as well, there are always at least two sides to each story. The titles of De Vos' paintings thus refer merely to the place and the time of the event depicted. He leaves it to us, in combination with the image itself, to imbue the works with meaning. For many of us, numerous pictures remain enigmatic, since we are no longer aware of the event being depicted. This might even be the best possible situation, for then we are forced to either do research into the meaning of the image (and who really wants to make that effort, honestly?), or to accept the painting as a painting, nothing more, but also nothing less.
In the end, the images exist merely to be painted. For the true goal of the artist is not to represent, comment on, or even worse, interpret reality, but rather to paint, as simple as this may seem. Just as there is no one way to paint an image, there is of course not only one way to read it. But it's the painting more than the reading that interests Eddy De Vos the most. It's the very act of painting, from selecting the image, the composition and the colours to actually applying the paint onto the canvas. How we as viewers interpret them is, although not completely irrelevant, left entirely up to us. In the best case, we'll see the painting as a painting, something that represents its own reality and has a life of its own.
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