Diederik Gerlach

paintings

06 September – 05 October 2008

In his latest paintings Diederik Gerlach (1956) uses photographs of movie stars from the thirties or of old-fashioned holiday resorts. In his characteristic palette of mixed and subdued colours they are placed side by side or above one another, as if you are looking at a table on which various photographs are displayed. Thus an ambiguous, complex space is created in the painting, in which the observer will have to find correlations between the various representations. Gerlach bends the photographs of female movie stars to his will, for instance, by replacing the frequently theatrical background of the photo studio by a peculiar Alpine mountain scenery.

Next to and partly on top of this primary representation he places smaller pictures of interiors or landscapes, which one inevitably will begin to associate with the main character depicted. In this complex new image nostalgia has made room for a quaint and at times somewhat uncomfortable reality where the observer will have to find his way.Besides the larger paintings there is a series of small panels of old-fashioned holiday resorts in Tirol; to the left or right a textile pattern has each time been painted into the image. These abstract wings intensify the representation of a tennis court or an open-air swimming pool and raise them above the anecdotal.

With the exhibition the publication Diederik Gerlach is issued in the Haags Palet series with texts by Egbert van Faassen and Philip Peters.