Erik Pape, Ronald Versloot

paintings

7 May through 11 June 2017

For years, Erik Pape (1943) has been painting the busy Paris traffic hub Place Stalingrad, with its characteristic metro viaduct arches. In his most recent paintings, Erik Pape has been tapping into a different layer of his subject: objects on and around the square that usually remain unnoticed. The city clock, the plate of food in the bistro, the clochards’ matrasses, the rice cooker in the Chinese store or the table with second hand books. They lead our gaze away from the metro viaduct that had become almost an abstract icon in Erik Pape’s paintings, to the prosaic, sometimes harsh reality of daily life that he witnesses during his stays in Paris when he documents the square.

Ronald Versloot (1964) recently painted a series of works featuring sailboats in which he uses an almost abstract composition with the upright surface of the sail placed at an angle on the horizontal surface of the water. Typical of Versloot’s work is his direct and simple way of painting and his use of minimal means to compose an image. He also uses gloss paint to make the surface shiny and sometimes leaves one of the sails uncovered so the canvas can literally function as such. In other paintings he experiments with high-gloss and epoxy paints to breathe life into the landscape and, as if it were a stage setting, positions human figures in it with the use of templates.