Nour-Eddine Jarram, Erik Pape

drawings, paintings

11 January – 15 February 2015

In the 1990s Nour-Eddine Jarram (1956) became known for paintings in which he mixes works by Dutch masters with themes from Islamic visual culture. He replaced the heads of the physicians from Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson with tulips, for example. Over the past year, he has taken 17th-century Dutch landscapes as a point of departure for his pastel drawings.

In much the same way as the 17th-century painters, he adapts the landscapes to his own needs. Here and there a little man, composed of calligraphic characters, wanders through the landscape; a reference to Jarram’s own situation as a Moroccan artist surrounded by Dutch culture. Sometimes the little man is carrying a flag that does not feature a radical Islamic slogan but the words I Love Art instead.

Erik Pape (1942) shows a series of paintings on panels examining the possibilities of portraying space and structure by using a railway overpass as a recurring theme. These paintings have a striking, bright background on which the image is depicted in lines that are almost graphic. Sometimes, for instance when the painting is radically split into a dark and a light side, the image is nearly abstract.

He has familiarized himself with the subject to such an extent that his representation could be regarded as internalized. All works show great skill and understanding of the possibilities of the art of painting. The dynamics of the traffic and the feel of the square’s space are conveyed in pronounced, almost expressionistic colors.